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Friday, Nov 15th 2019, 13:05-14:20
Workshop: Computational approaches to (the history of) philosophy @ OZSW 2019.

This workshop concerns methodological reflection on computational approaches to the study of (the history of) philosophy. The goal is to discuss some state-of-the-art applications of computational methods in (historical) philosophical research and focus on their methodology. The main question of this workshop will be: What are the conditions under which computational methods can be used in philosophical research in a methodologically sound way? Additionally, it will discuss which obstacles there are to overcome for a successful use of computer methods in research in (the history of) philosophy.

Nowadays, enormous amounts of digitized philosophical texts, as well as new computer methods to analyze those texts are available, of which the researcher in (the history of) philosophy seemingly can benefit in their research. However, such computational endeavours contrast strikingly with the reality of (historical) philosophical research as it is traditionally done: researchers in these areas typically apply painstakingly fine-grained analyses to diverse
textual material of extremely high conceptual density. It is not easy to see how this gap can be bridged and ‘big data’ computer methods can yield truly relevant results in (the history of) philosophy.

In this workshop, we will discuss several state-of-the-art projects in which computational methods are used in philosophical research. The aim is to reflect on the methodologically: How to use computational methods in (historical) philosophical research in a methodologically sound way? For what type of research questions in (the history of) philosophy are computational methods fitting? What are the benefits and limitations of computational approaches with respect to traditional methods (close-reading)? An important aspect of this discussion concerns corpus-building: how to obtain a fitting and representative corpus relative to the research question? And lastly, we will discuss the practical side of doing computational research in philosophy today: What practical problems do researchers using computational methods in their philosophical research currently encounter?

  • 13:00: Introduction
  • 13:05: Sander Verhaegh: Computational approaches to the history of philosophy: promises and challenges
  • 13:30: Thijs Ossenkoppele: Quine’s naturalistic epistemology; a quantitative investigation
  • 13:55: Pia Sommeraurer & Annapaola Ginammi: Computational methods for the history of philosophy: interpretative models and corpus-building

Thursday, Oct 31th 2019, 16:00-17:30
Al Idrissou & Veruska Zamborlini
Title: Lenticular Lens II

Tuesday, Oct 8th 2019, 11:00-12:00
Eugenio Petrovich
Title: Reconstructing the sub-authorship network of recent analytic philosophy by analysing acknowledgements

Friday, May 17th 2019, 10:30-14:00
e-Ideas Workshop

Friday, May 3rd 2019, 13:30
Annapaola Ginammi, Jelke Bloem and Arianna Betti, University of Amsterdam
Title: Bolzano, Kant, and the Traditional Theory of Concepts: A computational investigation

Friday, April 26th 2019, 13:30
Research round

Friday, April 12th 2019, 13:30
Reading group session
Title: Smith, 2019: Contextual word representations: A contextual introduction

Friday, April 5th 2019, 13:30
Reading group session
Title: Carducci et al., 2019: Semantically aware text categorisation for metadata annotation

Friday, March 22nd 2019, 13:30
Greta Adamo, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the University of Genova
Title: Foundational Ontologies

Friday, March 8th 2019, 16:00
Greta Adamo, Fondazione Bruno Kessler and the University of Genova
Title: On the nature of business processes: an ontological analysis

Friday, March 1st 2019, 13:30
Jelke Bloem, University of Amsterdam
Title: Learning consistent embeddings from small data with Nonce2Vec

Friday, February 22nd 2019, 13:30
Anna Bellomo, University of Amsterdam
Title: Dedekind and Manders: Two conceptions of domain extension?

Friday, February 1st 2019, 13:30
Hein van den Berg, University of Amsterdam
Title: Axiomatic Biology and the Emergence of Biology as a Science

Friday, December 21st 2018, 13:30
Annapaola Ginammi, Jelke Bloem and Arianna Betti, University of Amsterdam
Title: Bolzano and the Traditional Theory of Concepts: A computational investigation

Abstract: Researchers in history and philosophy of science tend to be little involved in digital humanities projects. This is regrettable, however, because valuable contributions are obtained by applying even rather simple, well-known computational techniques to texts relevant to the work of researchers in history and philosophy of science (van Wierst et al. 2016). In this paper we substantiate the point by relying on a quantitative, computational analysis of texts in addressing an open question in the interpretation of Bolzano’s works. The question we will address is what role that which we will call the ‘traditional theory of concepts’ plays in his ideal of science.

Friday, November 23 2018, 13:30
Hein van den Berg, University of Amsterdam
Title: The Classical Model of Science in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy