Semantic Analysis of Philosophical Texts

This project conducts a semantic analysis of major philosophical works by Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Using Word2Vec models, it calculates semantic distances between existential concepts such as Death, Life, and Justice, offering insights into how these themes are explored across different philosophical traditions.

By leveraging computational techniques, this analysis maps out thematic focuses in each text, providing a data-driven approach to understanding philosophical discourse. Visualizations such as word clouds, ternary plots, and radar charts are used to present these relationships in an accessible manner, offering new perspectives on existential and metaphysical philosophy.

Kaggle Link

Key Features

1. Text Preprocessing

• Text Extraction: Extracts raw text from .txt files of philosophical works acquired using Amazon AWS Textractor.
  • Note: Due to copyright restrictions, these .txt files cannot be included in this repository.
• Tokenization & Lemmatization: Tokenizes, lemmatizes, and removes filler words, punctuation, and stop words to prepare the text for analysis.
• NLP: Ensures clean input data for word embedding using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.

2. Word Embedding and Semantic Distance Calculation

• Word2Vec Training: Trains Word2Vec models on preprocessed texts to capture the contextual relationships between words.
• Semantic Distance Calculation: Computes Euclidean distances between word vectors for key existential concepts like Death, Life, and Justice.
• Contextual Aggregation: Aggregates contextually similar words to these concepts, enabling thematic analysis.

3. Visualizations

• Word Clouds: Generates word clouds to visualize words closely associated with Death, Life, and Justice. The size of each word represents its semantic proximity to the key concept.
• Ternary Plots: Displays the relative semantic distances between Death, Life, and Justice in 3D space for each text.
• Radar Charts: Visualizes how each work relates to these three key concepts, showing the thematic emphasis across different authors.

Philosophical Text Corpus

This project analyzes texts from existential and moral philosophy, including:

• Albert Camus: The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus
• Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle
• Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Pure Reason
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea, Existentialism is Humanism

These texts provide a basis for comparative thematic analysis of existential and moral philosophy.

Comprehensive Thematic Comparison

The analysis provides quantifiable insights into how concepts of Death, Life, and Justice are treated across different philosophical works, enabling a deeper understanding of existential and moral philosophy.

Key Insights:

• Albert Camus:
  • The Stranger has a strong thematic focus on Death with close ties to Life, reflecting absurdist themes.
  • The Myth of Sisyphus emphasizes Justice in relation to rebellion and human struggle.
  • The Plague provides a balanced treatment of Death, Life, and Justice, exploring human suffering and morality.
• Franz Kafka:
  • The Trial distances Justice from Life and Death, critiquing bureaucratic absurdity.
  • Metamorphosis focuses on Life, with Death playing a significant secondary role, capturing existential despair.
• Immanuel Kant:
  • In Groundwork and Critique of Pure Reason, Justice dominates, while Death plays a minor role, reflecting Kant’s ethical structures.
• Jean-Paul Sartre:
  • Nausea focuses heavily on Life, with Death and Justice playing peripheral roles, representing existential nausea and freedom.
  • Existentialism is Humanism balances Life, Justice, and Death, highlighting the interconnections between human freedom, morality, and existential reality.

Visualizations

The project includes a range of visualizations:

• Ternary Plot: Displays each book's relative focus on Death, Life, and Justice.
• Radar Charts: Provides a comparative view of each book's treatment of these concepts.
• Word Clouds: Illustrates the most contextually similar words to the target concepts in each text.

Acknowledgments

This project is made possible by the profound contributions of Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Paul Sartre to existential and moral philosophy, and by open-source tools like NLTK, Gensim, Matplotlib, and Plotly.

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