Elmar Holenstein‘s Philosophy Atlas: Translating and Expanding a Global Cartography of Philosophy

Research Focus (2026–2027)
Coordinated by Jordan Kynes

This Research Focus is dedicated to the translation, revision, and expansion of Elmar Holenstein’s Philosophie-Atlas: Orte und Wege des Denkens. Holenstein’s Philosophy Atlas remains one of the most ambitious attempts to visualize the history of philosophy not as a linear sequence of canonical names, but as a geographically situated, multilingual, and interculturally entangled history of thought.

Through maps, diagrams, timelines, and registers, the Atlas makes the “places and paths of thinking” across world regions visible, from Africa and Southwest Asia to South Asia, East Asia, Europe, and the Americas. It is an academically rigorous mapping of global intellectual history that shows how philosophical traditions emerge, travel, transform, and renew themselves through routes of translation, migration, commerce, scholarly exchange, religious transmission, colonization, resistance, and cultural reinterpretation.

The GloPhi project builds upon Holenstein’s central idea that a geography of philosophy is not merely an auxiliary tool for historical orientation, but a hermeneutic instrument for conceiving of the paths, places and interactions of philosophical ideas in novel ways. Though philosophical texts, concepts, and traditions have been often treated as the sui generis products of individual thinkers, they are inextricably bound to their sites of articulation, the institutions in which they developed, as well as to competing or cohesive intellectual trends both near and far.

Maps have a unique capacity to not only locate philosophy, but reveal contexts, relations, asymmetries, and routes of transmission that often remain invisible in purely textual histories. Holenstein’s own methodological reflections emphasize that geography makes connections visible and that philosophical understanding gains depth when the spatial, linguistic, and situational contexts of thought are taken seriously. The GloPhi translation of the Atlas not only makes an important work available to an international readership, but serves as a first step in a broader research process. The result will serve scholars, students, and a wider interested public as an open-access resource for exploring philosophy’s global and interconnected heritage.

Integration into HePS

The Atlas project will also form an important base layer for the Hildesheim Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sources (HePS). Within HePS, the data contained in Holenstein’s Atlas—its maps, timelines, registers of thinkers and places, historical annotations, and cartographic relations—will be transformed into structured, semantically linked metadata. This will allow the Atlas to become part of a dynamic research infrastructure in which philosophical works, persons, concepts, schools, languages, institutions, and places can be searched, filtered, visualized, and related to one another in new ways. The HePS proposal explicitly envisions the integration of the Philosophy Atlas as a foundational dataset, including its cartographies and registers, while expanding it through GloPhi’s ongoing regional and linguistic research, especially some significant areas left uncovered in Holenstein’s original system.

In this way, the Atlas will no longer remain a static printed work, but will become part of an open, multilingual, and growing knowledge graph of philosophical sources. Its cartographic logic will be combined with HePS’s broader semantic model, which links sources to persons, concepts, traditions, places, languages, translations, commentaries, and reception histories. Users will thus be able to move from a map to a source, from a source to its translations and commentaries, from a thinker to places of activity and networks of influence, or from a concept to related traditions across regions. By integrating the Atlas into HePS, GloPhi aims to develop a new kind of digital philosophical historiography that makes the globally entangled history of philosophizing visible, searchable, and navigable.

The result will serve scholars, students, and a wider interested public as an open-access resource for exploring philosophy’s global and interconnected heritage. Rather than presenting the history of philosophy as a set of separate civilizational blocks, it will foreground interconnections, mediations, translations, shared problems, parallel developments, and contested appropriations. In doing so, the project contributes to new models of philosophical historiography: models that are polycentric rather than monocentric, relational rather than merely comparative, and attentive to the plurality of languages, genres, institutions, and media in which philosophy has taken shape.

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