Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Visualizing personal notes on the history of Western Philosophy

Deniz Cem Önduygu, one of the founders of the Turkish studio Fevkalade, is both a designer and an amateur philosopher who has read extensively on the history of the field.

Deniz's portfolio contains a wide variety of intriguing projects, but the one that got my attention the most is a visualization of his personal notes on the history of Western Philosophy; it's a work-in-progress that he updates regularly (I hope that in the future he'll consider a color scheme different than red-green.)

I got drawn to this experimental interactive graphic because I'm also interested in philosophy—particularly epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind—and the diagram reminded me of the visual notes I learned to draw when I was in High School: dense, hand-drawn network diagrams that work as personal mnemonic devices and that connect ideas, concepts, and direct quotes from books. Mine aren't interactive, though: