Is Digital History of Philosophy Possible?

The article raises the question of the possibility of “digitalization” in the field of the historical and philosophical research. We first give a brief overview of the main genres of philosophical historiography and then examine the compatibility of these genres with some instruments of natural language processing. It is argued that methods of distributional semantics (which in practice are often combined with network analysis and machine learning techniques) are among the most interesting for the historians of philosophy. However, such approaches are applicable not so much in the field of classical history of philosophy as in the field of intellectual (and cultural) history. In terms of content, the history of political thought provides more opportunities for such analysis than other domains of the history of philosophy. A forced digitalization of the field therefore carries the risk of displacing classical historical-philosophical approaches by methods of the “history of ideas” in the spirit of Lovejoy or “automatic discourse analysis” in the spirit of French structuralism. But even in these areas, the main limitations are theoretical rather than technical and concern the very possibility of operationalizing and quantifying philosophical concepts (or ideas) as something fundamentally different from words.