Here is what I’ve done since the last update:

1. Protagoras, Alfred Tarski, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Paul & Patricia Churchland, and Andy Clark are added.
2. Sentences are added/edited for Plato (4), René Descartes (2), David Hume, Gottlob Frege, Wilfred Sellars, Donald Davidson, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Saul Kripke, David Lewis (2), Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers.
3. Dozens of new connections are drawn.

I admit I was a bit scared of Tarski, but after I refreshed my knowledge of him by consulting secondary sources, I tried my luck with his “The Semantic Conception of Truth: and the Foundations of Semantics” (1944) – and what a joy it was. His writing is much clearer than I expected it to be (he writes in the beginning that this is an informal summary of his theory) and I now have a better understanding of his semantic theory of truth and his general stance on the subject of truth.

For Thomson, I studied three of her influential papers “A Defense of Abortion” (1971), “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem” (1976) and “The Statue and the Clay” (1998); and made sure I covered some of her other ideas by using secondary literature. It was nice to see that she has her half-red half-green full-circle with Philippa Foot – a philosopher who influenced her but whom she disagrees with on some issues. (There are many other full-circle couples like that in the visualization – I may write a post about this.)

I wasn’t sure whether to put Churchlands in separately or together as a unit. I had my answer when I read in their The New Yorker profile that Paul sometimes thinks of Pat and himself as two hemispheres of the same brain:

“To what extent has Pat shaped my conceptual framework and hence my perceptions of the world, and to what extent have I done that for her? I think the answer is, an enormous extent. But I don’t know how to unwind it.”

If they don’t know how to unwind it, who am I to do it? (I’ve recently bought Patricia’s latest book; I’ll be adding ideas from there too.)

I read Plato’s Phaedo and made some adjustments/additions based on that.

A unique situation arised when I had to use the same sentence for Clark and Chalmers since it was from their joint paper.

Finally, I spent some time to enrich the threads on issues around animal minds. I was delighted to see how Descartes came close to Dennett’s idea of free-floating rationales.

Right now I’m reading Mackie’s Ethics and updating him in the process. After that, I plan on doing some work on aesthetics which has been a rather underrepresented domain in my summary.