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The Evolution of Philosophy: A Metaphorical Cognition Perspective

Summary

Histories of philosophy are usually written as narrative and thematic comparison. They rarely offer reproducible, corpus-scale measurements of how thinkers conceptually frame their problems. This paper addresses that gap with Conceptual Metaphor Theory, applied computationally. The authors run MetaPro over the Philosophy Data Project corpus (Kaggle). MetaPro is a three-stage pipeline: it detects metaphorical words, paraphrases them literally, and then derives a target concept, a source concept and the mapping between them. The corpus contains about 300k sentences from more than 50 canonical Western works, dated from 350 BCE to 1985.

The extracted concepts are analysed at three levels:

  • yearly cosine-similarity series, to trace historical drift;
  • PCA bubble maps, to position individual philosophers;
  • heatmaps of normalized frequencies, to characterise schools.

The analysis shows a slow long-term convergence toward a shared core of embodied and communicative schemas. This core consolidates in the 18th–19th centuries, and variability returns as twentieth-century movements broaden the repertoire. Philosophers group by conceptual affinity rather than by chronology alone. Schools are distinguished most clearly by their composite mappings, not by targets or sources alone. The study shows how NLP metaphor tools can support quantitative intellectual history.

Key points

  • Resources: MetaPro handles metaphor identification, interpretation and concept mapping generation. The data is the Philosophy Data Project corpus (Alizadeh, 2020), drawn from Project Gutenberg and digitized PDFs.
  • Scale: From the corpus, the pipeline extracts 2,039 distinct target concepts, 2,644 distinct source concepts and 15,988 distinct mappings.
  • Coverage: The paper describes ten major schools, with additional movements also counted (Stoicism, Feminism, Nietzsche). By metaphor count, Aristotle leads among authors (68,569) and German Idealism among schools (74,309).
  • Signature mappings by school:
    • empiricism: perception is knowing
    • German Idealism: state is quality
    • phenomenology: perspective is sense
    • analytic: credibility is fact
    • continental: agreement is authority
    • capitalism vs. communism: attribute is quality vs. physical is power
    • Nietzsche: high_status is degree
    • Feminism: success is journey
  • Limitations and future work: The authors note uneven textual coverage and a Western-only canon. They plan to add non-Western and contemporary texts and to introduce human-in-the-loop validation.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3qdia7bp8cw3

@inproceedings{mao2026evolution,
  title = {{The Evolution of Philosophy: A Metaphorical Cognition Perspective}},
  author = {Mao, Rui and Chen, Dapeng and Huang, Zihao and Zhang, Xulang and Cambria, Erik},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3qdia7bp8cw3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3qdia7bp8cw3}
}

References

19 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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