A Mind-Map to Western Philosophy

My friend Steven Harms has just put up an excellent reference for those interested in philosophy. It attempts to chart the relationship context between the various books mentioned in my Episteme post from a while back. Steven writes:

Recently I read about a “Most Influential Books” list via Daniel Miessler’s post “Episteme”. I commented that it was a bit presumptuous to believe that the reader of the 100 list would be able to get anything out of some of the selections without other key concepts and items discussed in the previous authors’ work. For example, to make sense of Hume or Berkeley, you really need to know Aristotle’s Categories and Descartes’ Meditations. The former is not singled out and the latter didn’t make the list ( cogito ergo sum doesn’t rate? ).

I gave some thought as to how I could give a rough sketch of Western intellectual development in a broad-strokes sense that worked visually. Enter FreeMind. FreeMind is a mind-mapping software ( Free! ) that exports to PDF.

So I took an attempt at producing a PDF that gives context for these books.

Head over to Steven’s site to see the full post as well as the mind-map.

[ A Mind-Map to Western Philosophy ]