Thanks to the collaboration and commitment of a growing number of researchers, the scope of the Tree of Philosophers is growing.
The TEPT project started out by considering the most commonly acknowledged historical relation of academic descent, that is the relation between a PhD candidate who is supervised by a university professor. Although this kind of relation is common in contemporary academia, many academical environments have been characterised by different institutional relations.
For this reason, the first part of the project has been devoted to the reconstruction of significant samples from different historical academic contexts characterised by the availability of the relation between PhD candidate and supervisor: 19th-20th century Germany, the United States, Austria, 20th-century Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
The inclusion in the tree of other historical contexts featuring academic training in the field of philosophy is a goal of the TEPT project, but it is a difficult task. Indeed, the definition of historical relations that can be treated as institutional relations of descent requires specific knowledge of the historical configurations of academic institutions in diverse contexts. Moreover, this knowledge needs to be paired with familiarity with domain-specific archives and, unsurprisingly, with a good amount of working hours.
Such precious resources have been provided by researchers from the department of philosophy at the University of Turin (DFE Unito) and from the Northwestern Italian Philosophy PhD Curriculum, who allowed the Tree of Philosophers to grow by encompassing other kinds of relations of academic descent than PhD supervision, and thus by including new lines of descent in TEPT’s genealogy.
More specifically, the TEPT project can now rely on specific research concerning institutional landscapes and academic descent relations in:
- 19th century École Normale Supérieure (previously Pensionnat Normale), thanks to the work of Alessandro Taverniti (PhD candidate at FINO Curriculum/IHRIM-ENS Lyon);
- Magdalen College, New College, Balliol College at Oxford between 1940s and 1960s, thanks to the work of Paolo Babbiotti (PhD candidate at FINO Curriculum) and prof. Paolo Tripodi (DFE Unito);
- 20th century Italian universities, with a comprehensive focus on the University of Turin, thanks to the work of Giorgio Matteoli (PhD candidate at FINO Curriculum), Giuseppe Guastamacchia (DFE Unito) and prof. Massimo Ferrari (DFE Unito);
- Renaissance universities, thanks to the work of Giuseppe Pignatelli (PhD candidate at FINO Curriculum).
