Hugo Hogenbirk

The history of ideas has been steadily importing methods from the digital humanities in recent years. In particular, the (changing) meaning of words (as helpful portals to the discovery of ideas), has been modelled computationally by a number of researchers (de Bolla 2013; Betti and van den Berg 2014; Brezina et al. 2015; van Eijnatten, 2019; Longhi 2020; Hogenbirk and Mol 2022; Valleriani et al. 2022). Within semantic modelling, the most prevalent application is the tracing of meaning shift over time (Hamilton et al. 2016; de Bolla et al. 2019; Gavin et al. 2019; Wevers and Koolen 2020). Large corpora are investigated to see how and if the same word gets different associations over time. In this paper I also make use of semantic models of terms, but I use them not for the analysis of large corpora, but for the investigation of a singular work of philosophy: Anne Conway's (1631-1679) Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (hereafter The Principles). The paper sets up a pipeline for investigating a singular work computationall by arguing for an interpretation of the semantic similarity of two works; if two works are semantically similar, and one is prior to the other, then the earlier work is a likely candidate for being a (semantic) influence on the later work. Conway is a useful case due to the troubled history of her (scarce) works. I will argue that according to the computational outcomes René Descartes (1596-1650) and mechanicism are, despite the doctrinal disagreements Conway herself notes with Descartes, the most central sources for Conway's work.

In this paper we will analyze the concept of incoherency that has been put forward by Jesper Juul in Half-Real (2005). Juul provides a paradigmatic example of an incoherency in the game Donkey Kong. The main character of the narrative, Mario, can die and subsequently reappear at the beginning of the level. However, when pressed to describe the narrative of the game, most players would not say that Mario ever died. The respawn is attributed to the game rules instead. Juul calls this phenomenon an incoherency of the game’s fictional world. We claim that the precise nature of the concept of incoherency is unclear, and that Juul's connection between incoherency and contradictions is incorrect. Furthermore, we argue that Wesp incorrectly identifies the concept with 'incompleteness' in his response to Juul (Wesp, 2014). Our clarification argues that what is noteworthy in 'incoherency' is not some aspect of the fictional world, like it being contradictory or incomplete, but how the player interprets the fiction. Subsequently, we provide an explanation for what underlies an incoherency by adopting the principle of charity (Davidson 1973). Lastly we discuss how a proper understanding of incoherency can help game designers and how it relates to ludonarrative dissonance (Hocking, 2009).

Anne Conway (1631–1679) is argued to be a relationist about time and possibly a weak absolutist about space. We deny the latter, arguing that Conway invokes ‘creatures’ (one of three metaphysical primitives in her system) to construct her account of space, showing that space is not metaphysically prior to the creatures inhabiting it. This places her in a broader tradition of philosophers who reduce space and time to real properties of existing things. However, Conway reduces these properties in an unexpected way. Following her view that the essence of creatures consists in their ‘mutability’, spatial and temporal properties turn out to depend on creatures’ motions. We show this by investigating Conway’s notions of divisibility and multiplicity and their roles in the lives of individual creatures, revealing how space (and time) are grounded in their fundamental moral vocation.

In a recent Metaphilosophy article, Moti Mizrahi and Michael Dickinson argue against characterizing the divide between analytical and continental philosophy as a divide in the use of arguments. This hypothesis is rejected on the basis of a text‐mining approach. The present paper argues that the results they extracted do not answer the questions they set out to answer as well as would have been possible. This is due to Mizrahi and Dickinson's choice to disregard duplicate occurrences of argument word pairs, their main indicator for the occurrence of arguments in articles. This paper reconstructs their method by now also counting duplicates. A small corpus (n = 436) of recent (2015–2021) analytical and continental articles is used to rerun the experiment; the results oppose Mizrahi and Dickinson's and suggest that arguments (as operationalized by Mizrahi and Dickinson) occur more in analytical articles. The paper argues that part of the discrepancy derives from the specific methodological choices they made.

ABSTRACT Although natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, studying its evolution as a whole remains problematic. In this paper, we present a method that integrates traditional reading and computational tools in order to distil from different resources (the four existing Dictionaries of early modern philosophers and WorldCat) a representative corpus (consisting of 2,535 titles published in Latin, French, English, and German) for mapping the evolution of natural philosophy. In particular, we focus on gathering authors and works that were (directly or indirectly) engaged with the teaching of natural philosophy in the early modern academic milieu. We offer a preliminary assessment of the relevance of our corpus by investigating one aspect of this evolution, namely the trends in the acknowledgments of authorities linked with different and competing approaches to natural philosophy (scholastic, Cartesian, and Newtonian). The results not only corroborate existing knowledge, but they also show distinctive features and differences within these trends that were not observed previously, thus illustrating the heuristic potential of our computational method for corpus collection.