Corso di laurea magistrale in Filosofia

In this course you acquire knowledge and understanding of the foundations of the history of ideas as a scholarly practice, the reasons why this practice lends itself well to quantitative and computational transformation, and you will apply the knowledge and understanding you have thus acquired by designing and conducting in practice a small, well-delimited quantitative and computational research on one philosophical concept(ion) or position of your choice.

In particular, your learn how to do methodologically sound research in the history of ideas. Following an initial theoretical training on how to do proper research in the
history of ideas, you will set up your research project as follows. You will (i) identify, supported by the instructor, one concept(ion) in the history of ideas of which you want to research the spread, development or influence in/upon a specific author, period or field; (ii) acquire preliminary systematic background on this concept(ion) by conducting a literature study on major accounts, takes or interpretations of this concept(ion); (iii) construct an interpretive model of it, which you will judge apt to the research; (iv) identify and build an adequate corpus of texts for your research; (iii) formulate research questions that are suitable to be answered by applying simple computational tools to the corpus (such as voyanttools.org); (iv) annotate (evaluate) for relevance the results you obtain by following your model.

2 x 3 hours 6 weeks (generally 1 x theory/preparation; 1 x lab) - Tuesday & Thursday 10:00-13:00 from Apr 28 to June 4. Paper due on

You will communicate the results of your work to your peers in (a) one short talk
(likely given twice in class), (b) a draft to be reworked in a final report of max 4000 word;, (c) comments to be given on your fellow students’ paper draft (d) an open bibliography on Zotero of your research; (e) possibly, a blog post in which you reflect on the research process. The final grade will be expressed on a scale up to 30/30, of which the oral reports will count for 20%, the final paper for 75% and all activities under (c)-(e) for 5%.
The success of the course will be measured as the extent to which the students manage to successfully set up and conduct from scratch an experimental, well-delimited research task, of which every component is novel for them (theoretical setup, identification of one use case and the appropriate research workflow, application of theoretical setup and novel techniques) and the extent and depth of their reflect on all the methodological aspects of the task.

https://quine1960.wordpress.com/history-of-ideas/

Here is a preliminary list of readings:
Betti, Arianna. Against Facts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015 (fragments)
Betti, Arianna, and Hein van den Berg. “Modelling the History of Ideas.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22, no. 4 (2014): 812–35.
———. “Towards a Computational History of Ideas.” In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Digital Humanities in Luxembourg with a Special Focus on Reading Historical Sources in the Digital Age. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.Org, edited by Lars Wieneke, Catherine Jones, Marten Düring, Florentina Armaselu, and René Leboutte, Vol. 1681. Aachen, 2016.
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1681/Betti_van_den_Berg_computational_history_of_ideas.pdf.
Betti, Arianna, Hein van den Berg, Yvette Oortwijn, and Caspar Treijtel. “History of Philosophy in Ones and Zeros.” In Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy, edited by Mark Curtis and Eugen Fischer, 295–332. Advances in Experimental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AgPq3zEkkYuOiP5Q8-ia4_sSI3CyOw.
Betti, Arianna, Martin Reynaert, and Hein van den Berg. “@PhilosTEI: Building Corpora for Philosophers.” In CLARIN in the Low Countries, edited by Jan Odijk and Arjan van Hessen, 371–384. London: Ubiquity
Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/bbi.32.
Ginammi, Annapaola, Jelke Bloem, Rob Koopman, Shenghui Wang, and Arianna Betti. “Bolzano, Kant and the Traditional Theory of Concepts - A Computational Investigation [under Review] [Commissioned for Volume under Contract].” In The Dynamics of Science: Computational Frontiers in History and Philosophy of Science, edited by Andreas de Block and Grant Ramsey. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2019.
Jong, Willem R de, and Arianna Betti. “The Classical Model of Science I – A Millennia-Old Model of Scientific Rationality.” Synthese 174, no. 2 (2010).
http://www.springerlink.com/content/0039-7857/174/2/
https://www.surfgroepen.nl/sites/cmsone/cmsoneweb/index.html.
Ossenkoppele, Thijs. “Quine’s Naturalistic Epistemology; A Quantitative Investigation.” BA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2019.
Sangiacomo, A. “Modelling the History of Early Modern Natural Philosophy: The Fate of the Art-Nature Distinction in the Dutch Universities.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2018.
Van den Berg, Hein, Arianna Betti, Castermans, Thom, Koopman, Rob, Speckmann, Bettina, Verbeek, Kevin, van der Werf, Titia, Wang, Shenghui, and Westenberg, Michel. “A Philosophical Perspective on Visualization for Digital Humanities.” In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH). Berlin, 2018.
http://vis4dh.dbvis.de/papers/2018/A%20Philosophical%20Perspective%20on%20Visualization%20for%20Digital%20Humanities.pdf.
Wierst, Pauline van, Arianna Betti, Steven Hofstede, Thom Castermans, Michel Westenberg, Yvette Oortwijn, Shenghui Wang, and Rob Koopman. “BolVis: Visualization for Text-Based Research in Philosophy.” Berlin, 2018.
http://vis4dh.dbvis.de/papers/2018/BolVis%20Visualization%20for%20Text-based%20Research%20in%20Philosophy.pdf.
Wierst, Pauline van, Sanne Vrijenhoek, Stefan Schlobach, and Arianna Betti. “Phil@Scale: Computational Methods within Philosophy.” In Proceedings of the Third Conference on Digital Humanities in Luxembourg with a Special Focus on Reading Historical Sources in the Digital Age. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.Org, edited by Lars Wieneke, Catherine Jones, Marten Düring, Florentina Armaselu, and René Leboutte, Vol. 1681. Aachen, 2016.
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1681/Wierst_et_al_Philo_at_scale.pdf.