The Evolution of Philosophy: A Metaphorical Cognition Perspective

Abstract

We present a large-scale study of philosophical cognition through the lens of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Using a computational metaphor processing system that extracts target concepts, source concepts, and concept mappings from a curated corpus of 50+ canonical texts (300k sentences) spanning ten schools from antiquity to the late twentieth century, we quantify how metaphor organizes philosophical argument. We model temporal dynamics with year-level cosine series, authorial neighborhoods with PCA projections, and school signatures with heatmaps of normalized frequencies. The study demonstrates that the history of philosophy is structured by stable cross-domain schemas that are selectively recombined to address new problems.

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