Cambridge, UK

Following the 30th anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web, a Cambridge organisation is launching a radical new way to access the world’s philosophy. Dubbed "philosophies.space", the system allows anyone with a web browser to take a visual overview of philosophical research and zoom into specific areas of interest.

Stefan Haselwimmer, founder of philosophies.space, said, "If you are starting out in philosophy, there’s a bewildering array of different subject areas and it’s very easy to get lost. philosophies.space is our attempt to provide a simple map to all the complexity. Users can start with an overview and zoom in closer and closer, right down to the level of individual concepts and abstracts."

The idea for philosophies.space came to Stefan while studying philosophy at Cambridge in the early 90s. He had the vision of creating a computer system that would transform the way people conduct philosophical enquiry and open the subject to a wider audience.

The philosophies.space system, currently in beta, gives access to a range of open access philosophy content from Wikipedia and PhilPapers.org. But Stefan has plans to create "PubPhil", a philosophy version of PubMed, the comprehensive index of biomedical literature, in order to provide a comprehensive database of all the latest philosophical abstracts. "In order to apply AI, machine learning and data mining techniques to philosophy it’s crucial we have the highest quality and largest text corpus possible," Stefan said.

Stefan is keen to collaborate with philosophers and technology developers to develop the system further. If you would like to get more involved, please contact Stefan through the website at philosophies.space

For more information about philosophies.space, go to: http://philosophies.space

To use the system, go to: http://map.philosophies.space

To see an early demo of a philosophy-based game Stefan is working on, visit:  http://philosophies.space/game

Contact Stefan

Email: haselwimmer@gmail.com

Phone: 07719 437803

Twitter: @allphilosophies

About Stefan Haselwimmer

A former philosophy student, Stefan completed his undergraduate philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, his Diploma in Philosophy at Warwick (studying under Popper’s research assistant David Miller), and his Masters in History and Philosophy of Science at King’s College, London. As an internet innovator, he launched The Independent and Mirror newspapers on the internet in 1997, ran New Statesman Online for five years and went on to create PhoneAnything, the UK’s first telephone portal to provide phone access to internet content.

He has recently been conducting research into machine learning and text mining and is co-author on a 2018 paper on "Literature-Based Knowledge Discovery":

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bioinformatics/bty845/5124276