TEPT is a DR2 project funded by Fondazione CRT.
TEPT – Turin Enhanced Philosophy Tree
Grant n. 2021/0539
P.I. prof. Guido Bonino, DFE UniTO
Overview of the project
The TEPT –Turin Enhanced Philosophy Tree aims at producing the Tree of Philosophers. The Tree of Philosophers is a digital repository of information concerning the relationships of academic descent among philosophers: philosopher A was the teacher/supervisor/master/etc. of philosopher B. As can be easily imagined, such relations can take on very different forms, according to the historical period, the geographical area and the institutional setting. The attempt to keep track of such differences is one of the main peculiarities of the Tree of Philosophers with respect to other similar undertakings.
The use of the term “tree” may involve some suggestions that are not, rigorously speaking, correct. In fact, it may happen that a philosopher has more than one “parent” (multiple supervisors, compresence of different kinds of master-pupil relationships, etc.), so that what one gets is not a simple tree, but a more complex graph, branching in both directions. Furthermore, the data here collected do not give rise to a single connected graph, but rather to a number of unconnected ones. Therefore what is here available could be more correctly called a “polyforest”.
An important feature of the Tree of Philosophers is that it focuses on institutional relationships, that is to say, on relationships that are institutionally recognized, and that can – at least in principle – be documented as such. This means that generic relations of influence, however certain and significant, are not taken into account. The focus is deliberate: the Tree of Philosophers is intended as a resource concerning the institutional (which usually means academic) transmission of philosophy. Keeping this kind of transmission distinct from other, more informal, channels allows for possible comparisons, which would be made impossible by mixing things up. It is probably interesting, for instance, to be able to observe whether the institutional genealogy of philosophy, in specific spatio-temporal circumstances, does or does not approximate the usual historiographic picture of that philosophical context. Moreover, taking generic relations of influence into account would require an appreciable amount of arbitrary decisions for each case. All that would make the Tree of Philosophers the final result of a complex historiographic work, in which the judgments of the editors would play a crucial role. By contrast, we conceive of the tree not as a final result, but as the possible starting point for other researchers; in consideration of this aim, it is certainly better to keep the role of personal judgments, though well meditated, to a minimum.
Some relatively arbitrary decisions are in any case unavoidable as to who is to count as a philosopher (and therefore is to be included in the tree) and who is not. This is of course a very general problem of “field delineation”, which is not exclusive to the tree, but must be faced by anyone who is trying to write, e.g., a history of philosophy. In order to comprehend potentially interesting information on the connections between philosophy and other disciplines, we tried to include “parents” of philosophers who were not themselves philosophers, as well as “children” of philosophers who did not work themselves as philosophers.
Keeping track of academic kinship and descent has been popular practice in many fields of knowledge production. Mathematics stands as a particularly prominent example. Indeed, there can be some peculiar sensitivity to academic descent among mathematicians: anecdotal references to their relatively few degrees of separation from famous and hyperproductive mathematician Paul Erdős, or to Newton being their nth Doktorvater are more common than one would anticipate among mathematicians’ CVs and personal pages. Master-pupil relationships, often based on the Doktorvater role, have been recorded in many universities starting from the 16th century, thus providing records that are now converging in online repositories such as Wikidata and in domain-specific resources such as the Mathematics Genealogy Project. More recently, academic family trees appeared for other disciplines: Neurotree reconstructs the academic genealogy of neuroscientists, and its making soon overlapped with the development of a multidisciplinary academic tree by Princeton researchers. Family trees have been provided for philosophy as well (although with little coverage from both a historical and geographical point of view): Princeton’s academic tree has a section devoted to (a part of) USA-related philosophy, while famous Australian philosopher David Chalmers hosts the Australasian Philosophy Family Tree on his personal website. Chalmers states that the tree should be considered as a contribution to the Philosophy Family Tree developed and maintained by Josh Dever starting from 2002, which has not been available since 2018.
The Tree of Philosophers is available online (https://treeofphilosophers.it) in a fully searchable configuration: data can be visualized in card form or as graphs, and can be interrogated by means of sophisticated queries. Data in different formats can be provided upon request.
The Tree of Philosophers is an ongoing project, which will probably always be in need of correction (some mistakes are certainly still present in the database, notwithstanding our efforts), expansion (adding new philosophers), enrichment (adding new data concerning philosophers and/or their relations) and refinement (devising more accurate ways to represent the relations). Everybody is invited to collaborate.
July 2021 – Beginning of the project
July 2021 – Grant Awarded to DR2!
A post concerning the TEPT project has been published on the main blog: Grant Awarded to DR2!
December 2021 – TEPT Database
A post concerning the TEPT project has been published on the main blog: A database for TEPT.
May 2022 – TEPT gets an annotation tool
A post concerning the TEPT project has been published on the main blog: TEPT gets an annotation tool.
November 2022 – Disambiguation of TEPT data
A post concerning the TEPT project has been published on the main blog: Disambiguation of TEPT data – The use of personal identifiers.
January 2023 – THIRD DR2 CONFERENCE (in Rome!)
- The third session of the Third DR2 Conference, held in Rome, has been devoted to the discussion of methodological issues concerning the TEPT project. See the post on the main blog: THIRD DR2 CONFERENCE (in Rome!)
January 2023 – Grant awarded to Pietro Lana
- Duration: 6 months
- Type: History of Philosophy, Digital Humanities
- Tasks: data-entry, data-mining, annotation;
- Aftermath: renewal of the grant in July 2023
February 2023 – Grant awarded to Davide Colla
- Duration: 4 months
- Type: Co-funded research grant (Assegno di Ricerca) at the Computer Science department, UniTO
- Title: “Sviluppo di tecnologie per l’analisi semantica del linguaggio naturale e per l’annotazione, l’estrazione, la rappresentazione e la visualizzazione di informazioni da documenti testuali”
- Tasks: database design, data management and annotation tools development;
- Aftermath: hired as RTDa (temporary researcher) at the History Department, UniTO, in June 2023
April 2023 – The Tree of Philosophers is branching out!
A post concerning the TEPT project has been published on the main blog: The Tree of Philosophers is branching out!
July 2023 – Grant renewal for Pietro Lana
- Duration: 3 months
- Type: History of Philosophy, Digital Humanities
- Tasks: annotation, archival resources;
- Aftermath: enrolled in the Literary Studies PhD School of UniTO, November 2023
July 2023 – DR2 Visit to Magdalen College – Oxford
- Duration: 1 week
- Visitor: Paolo Babbiotti
- Tasks: Exam of archival resources at the libraries and archives of Magdalen College, New College, Balliol College, Bodleian Library.
- Aftermath: critic discussion of academic relatipnships between tutors and students – 1940s-1960s
September 2023 – Grant awarded to Biagio Eugenio Iaria
- Duration: 3 months
- Type: Computer Science
- Tasks: Front-end development;
- Aftermath: Master’s degree in Computer Science
September 2023 – Cooperation agreement between DFE UniTO and CNR – ILIESI
- Scientific contacts: Prof. Guido Bonino (DFE UniTO), Prof. Enrico Pasini (CNR – ILIESI)
November 2023 – TEPT final event: presentation of the Tree of Philosophers
A post concerning the TEPT project has been published on the main blog: TEPT final event: presentation of the Tree of Philosophers.
