ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘the canon’ has a long history across the humanities, including philosophy. It is important to recognise, however, that the canon is, in large part, a device designed to compensate for our own human cognitive limitations: there is only so much that we can hold in memory and intellectually manage at one time. If, instead, we had a means of expanding our storage and processing capacities to indefinite size and speed, ‘the canon’ might be dramatically expanded in size, or even be eliminated altogether in favour of using the entire corpus of a given author, period or philosophical perspective. The new ‘digital history’ enables us to do exactly that by externalising (certain aspects of) our scholarly work to computers, and then using the output (often an information-dense data visualisation) to advance our knowledge further than would have been possible by means of native brainpower alone. In this chapter, the author discusses these issues and then briefly reviews four instances of digital historical work on the disciplinary boundary between philosophy and psychology in order to provide a variety of examples in which this emerging new approach to scholarship can work for historians of philosophy.
