The Sociology of Philosophies is a fascinating book by Randall Collins, in which he attempts to lay out a global history of philosophy in terms of interpersonal relations between philosophers. These connections are layed out in the form of graphs. This my attempt to visualize a bit of that data, depicting 440 years of western ancient philosophy. The colors of the links represent a rough estimate of the kind of relationship that two philosophers had. Spring green is the tie between a master and his pupil, dark green a mere aquaintance and rust a conflict laden relationship. Links in light blue are only suspected by Collins. The speed of the simulation is varying with the complexity, so that you have time to look into more complex structures in detail. Please feel free to move them around as you please. As the lifes of early or marginal thinkers are often related to us with little detail, many of the dates lying behind the animation are very rough estimates. If only a time of flourishing is known, I have assumed the philosopher to be 45 years at that time, and to have reached 65 years. As detail on specific life events is even more sparse, the links span from the birth of the younger till the death of the older philosopher and do not reflect specific events. That might be stuff for another project. I would love to hear from you if you have any comments, ideas or have spotted some mistake. Also, if you are interested in more philosophy networks, feel free to have a look at my Website!

Maximilian Noichl, Vienna 2017
noichlmax@hotmail.co.uk