Philosophie als digitale Geisteswissenschaft

Abstract

Within the Digital Humanities, philosophy still plays quite a marginal role. My investigation into the reasons behind this situation is divided into two parts. The first addresses the role of the discipline in the early years of DH, concentrating on a pioneering project that until now has been ignored in the historiography of early DH research: the Kant Index. Work on the index started in 1958, only one year after the publication of the first automated concordance in 1957. The first volume was published in 1967, seven years before the first publication of a volume of Busa’s Index Thomisticus. If we look at later developments, there seems to be a certain asymmetry between trends in the English-speaking world and German-language philosophy. This may suggest that philosophy in the German-speaking regions understands itself first and foremost as a ‘book discipline’, so that electronic forms of publication – the central venue for DH work – are viewed with suspicion. Nevertheless, I show in the second part that on a global scale DH work does play a role in the discipline. I identify five areas of interest: (1) editions and infrastructure, (2) prosopography, (3) text mining, (4) Semantic Web technologies, and (5) reflections on method.

Keywords

• philosophie
• ideengeschichte
• geschichte
• digital humanities