Via Massimo Pugliucci on G+ I came across an interesting post with a node-network graph depicting the history of philosophy in terms of who influenced who. The dataset used are the items 'influenced by' in the different Wikipedia pages for each philosopher. Intuitively, the picture may seem to be basically correct, with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche as the big nodes. But unsurprisingly, medieval philosophers for example don't stand out, which reflects the usual neglect of the period in traditional historiography of philosophy (where the hell is Aquinas?). At any rate, obviously the graph will only be as good as the initial dataset permits, but the general idea of such graphical representations is quite interesting.
Below the fold is the whole graph where only the big nodes are discernible, but the original post has a couple of close-ups well worth looking into:
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