Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Reading and understanding philosophical texts is often seen as a task that requires rationality, higher order thinking, and abstract reasoning. This seems like something that humans are uniquely able to do, and if we encountered a new species, and they could do philosophy, it would be hard to deny their rationality. It is one thing if a monkey, a parrot, or a smart phone can do basic math, but another if they can offer commentary on Plato. In this video we will look at how an artificial intelligence system, (specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation Topic Modelling with Gibbs Sampling) would categorize Plato’s dialogues. The system won’t be trying to do anything too complicated, just divide the dialogues into categories that make sense with minimal human input. Surprisingly the program does identify clear topics in the works of Plato, though they are not the topics I initially hypothesized, into early, middle and late.
If you want to check out the visualizations yourself, here's the full blog: carneades.org/2021/11/16/how-would-artificial-intelligence-categorize-platos-dialogues
If you want to try topic modeling yourself here's the github for DARIAH-DE: dariah-de.github.io/TopicsExplorer
If you want to download the text files used here's project Guttenburg: gutenberg.org
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:20 Early Middle and Late Plato
2:05 Topic Modeling Basics
4:05 Methods and Data Sources
5:29 Three Topics (First Viz)
8:34 How Many Topics? (Second Viz)
15:48 Five Topics (Third Viz)
Donate on Patreon: patreon.com/Carneades
Buy stuff with Zazzle: zazzle.com/store/carneades?rf=238568769552007656
Follow us on Twitter: @CarneadesCyrene twitter.com/CarneadesCyrene
Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Collier-MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and more! #ArtificialIntelligence #Plato #AI
Reading and understanding philosophical texts is often seen as a task that requires rationality, higher order thinking, and abstract reasoning. This seems like something that humans are uniquely able to do, and if we encountered a new species, and they could do philosophy, it would be hard to deny their rationality. It is one thing if a monkey, a parrot, or a smart phone can do basic math, but another if they can offer commentary on Plato. In this video we will look at how an artificial intelligence system, (specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation Topic Modelling with Gibbs Sampling) would categorize Plato’s dialogues. The system won’t be trying to do anything too complicated, just divide the dialogues into categories that make sense with minimal human input. Surprisingly the program does identify clear topics in the works of Plato, though they are not the topics I initially hypothesized, into early, middle and late.
If you want to check out the visualizations yourself, here's the full blog: carneades.org/2021/11/16/how-would-artificial-intelligence-categorize-platos-dialogues
If you want to try topic modeling yourself here's the github for DARIAH-DE: dariah-de.github.io/TopicsExplorer
If you want to download the text files used here's project Guttenburg: gutenberg.org
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:20 Early Middle and Late Plato
2:05 Topic Modeling Basics
4:05 Methods and Data Sources
5:29 Three Topics (First Viz)
8:34 How Many Topics? (Second Viz)
15:48 Five Topics (Third Viz)
Donate on Patreon: patreon.com/Carneades
Buy stuff with Zazzle: zazzle.com/store/carneades?rf=238568769552007656
Follow us on Twitter: @CarneadesCyrene twitter.com/CarneadesCyrene
Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Collier-MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and more! #ArtificialIntelligence #Plato #AI
