Philosophy Data

Hi! I'm Kourosh Alizadeh, a data scientist and philosopher based out of Denver, CO. When I was very young, my dad reprimanded my childhood laziness by quoting Parmenides and saying "nothing comes from nothing." Ever since, I've been trying my best to figure out what cryptic phrases like that could possibly mean. That quest for understanding led me to my early studies of philosophy and I quickly fell in love with the discipline.

Eventually, I was accepted into a PhD program at the University of California, Irvine. There, I completed a dissertation on Kant and Hegel, two key thinkers of the German Idealist movement. While working on that project, I also taught topics like Chinese philosophy at other universities in the area, all while running a tutoring business on the side and dabbling in code projects.

After graduating, I decided to transition out of academia and into tech. So I enrolled in a data science boot camp and started learning all about the wonderful world of data. But philosophy never really left my heart, and I was itching to use these new tools and technologies in a way that could help researchers and educators in my old field. So I decided to create the Philosophy Data Project, a place where the powerful tools of data science could be used to help understand the great ideas of philosophers throughout history.

While the project is a constant work in progress (I've got a long list of texts to add to the corpus and far too many ideas about explorations to do with the data), it's a start in providing a data-driven understanding of philosophy. The text stats page can provide a solid starting point for getting to know the key concepts of a thinker or school, and the word use analysis page provides a deep dive into how each philosopher uses their terms. The ability to quickly search the corpus is something I know I wish I had in grad school, and the classifier showcases one of the many potential market applications of this data. And to top it off, I've been able to provide a guide to interpreting all these tools so that they can be useful to people without any technical background. All in all, it's a project I'm proud of and I'm excited to keep building!

If you have any suggestions or want to get involved with the project in any way, feel free to contact me. I'd be happy to collaborate or to showcase any work you've done with the dataset.