Of the several subjects of knowledge

The philpapers.org category for Thomas Hobbes has over 1,000 entries. I’m thinking about ways to introduce sub-categories — perhaps not as many as in, say, the Kant category, but still sensible ways to divide up the area. My draft list of categories is below. Does anyone have any suggestions? Things you’d like to see added? Things you’d like to see cut?

• Laws of nature
• Social contract
• Status of sovereign and subject (absolutism, rebellion, etc)
• Moral psychology (passions, egoism)
• Epistemology and method
• Mind
• Language (signification, nominalism, rhetoric, etc)
• Religion
• Liberty and necessity
• Mathematics
• Physics, optics, etc
• History
• Political context (civil war etc)
• Intellectual context

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CFP: The History of Women’s Ideas

The following CFP might be of interest to our readers:

The History of Women’s Ideas

Deadline for Submissions: April 30, 2014
Advisory Editors: Karen Green , Ruth Hagengruber

The history of Western philosophy has been almost exclusively a history of the ideas of men. Occasionally women thinkers have played a minor role, often as adjuncts to men, whose key works make up the visible stepping stones taking us from the late Mediaeval mind set of Dante, through the Early Modern revolution of Montaigne, Descartes, Locke and Leibniz, to the Enlightenment of Voltaire, Kant and beyond. Recently the works of some of these adjuncts—such as Christine de Pizan, who disseminated Dante in France, Marie de Gournay, Montaigne’s editor, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Descartes’s correspondent, Damaris Masham, Locke’s friend, or Emilie du Châtelet, lover of Voltaire, to name but a few—have begun to emerge from the shadows. In this issue of The Monist we invite papers treating of the philosophical works of female participants in the intellectual history of the West. We also invite contributions addressing the broader question: do the contributions of women thinkers such as those listed above allow us to distinguish what we might think of as a history of women’s ideas?

h/t Sandrine Berges, Feminist History of Philosophy

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“Six Degrees of Francis Bacon”

I imagine some of our readers will find this historical social networking project of interest:

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon (SDFB) is a digital reconstruction of the early modern social network (EMSN) that scholars and students from all over the world will be able to collaboratively expand, revise, curate, and critique. Historians and literary critics have long studied the way that early modern people associated with each other and participated in various kinds of formal and informal groups. Yet their scholarship, published in countless books and articles, is scattered and unsynthesized. By data-mining existing scholarship that describes relationships between early modern persons, documents, and institutions, we have created a unified, systematized representation of the way people in early modern England were connected. Unlike published prose, SDFB is extensible, collaborative, and interoperable: extensible in that actors and associations can always be added, modified, developed, or, removed; collaborative in that it synthesizes the work of many scholars; interoperable in that new work on the network is put into immediate relation to previously mapped relationships. [read more]

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