Introduction
The work of Marcus Aurelius and its place in the philosophical school of Stoicism has for centuries been the subject of scholarly activity. One can argue, however, that antique philosophical concepts have been studied too much in their objective meanings and implications, without considering enough the humans behind them, in all of their individualities and perhaps even, personalities.
We believe that understanding the subjective perspectives of philosophers is key for grasping the concepts and themes they work on and build upon - that is, the way these general outlooks contribute in shaping concepts in certain ways. We can do this by inscribing their corresponding themes in certain sentiments about them, from positive to negative.
As such, we decided to work on Marcus Aurelius’ book Meditations, rich in both concepts and sentiments, to produce a linguistic and sentiment analysis ontology of his writings. What better work indeed to deal with this problem, than that of the most popular stoic philosopher, concerned before anything else about dealing with human emotions, and on providing a general system of “ethics” concerning them - a way of living, spiritual exercises, therapeutics[1]?
Knowledge extraction digital tools and techniques can make the study of these questions much more feasible, while still maintaining an objective approach, based on concrete observations. These tools allow one to analyze the overall system of an author’s writing, from a more “distant” perspective [2], with the opportunity to discover associations between their sentiments and the recurring themes and agents inside their work.
1. Dirk Baltzly, (2019) Stoicism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
2. Franco Moretti, (2005) Graph, Maps and Trees. Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso
Research Questions
The principal research questions of OntoMeditations can be formulated in this way: what patterns can we observe, in between the philosophical concepts and themes of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the specific stoic sentiments they are associated with, from the positive stoic calm to the negative stoic trouble? Which ontology would best identify the main entities in this sentiment polarity applied to stoicism, the most important concepts of Meditations and their related themes, as well as the external agents or more abstract figures mentioned throughout the philosopher’s writings? What sentiments are these different concepts, external agents and abstract figures associated with the most, in general?
Our ontology, as such, had the preliminary requirements of clearly distinguishing abstract figures from concepts’ instances (such as “god”), as well as of including in concepts’ instances their logical opposites (which, though indirectly, still refer to the macro-concepts themselves).
Ontology creation
For the creation of our ontology, we first started by reading and studying Meditations thoroughly, while trying to grasp the philosophy behind Marcus Aurelius's words, so as to identify his view of stoicism.
In order to do this, we made an initial distinction between “stoic calm” and “stoic trouble”, to inscribe a sentiment polarity (or spectrum) in the Stoic philosophy context, and so as to pinpoint in Marcus Aurelius’ diaries the main instanciations of these sentimentally connotated terms or concepts.
We also aimed to identify the core concepts Marcus Aurelius uses or refers to indirectly, in terms of recurrence. After a collective deliberation and verification of recurrence for each macro-concept and their instances, we decided to have these 6 categories: Nature, Death, Power, Justice, Reason, Psyche/body and Providence. To each of these conceptual categories, we linked their main instances throughout the text.
With the help of previously acquired knowledge in Classical studies, we managed to justify some word choices through a confrontation of the English-translated text with the original ancient Greek one. For instance, in the English translation, the word "violence" corresponds to the ancient Greek "hybris"; if to the common reader, the English term can appear not so significant, its Greek correspondent has a meaningful place inside the history of Greek philosophy, as well as a strong sentimental, passionate connotation to it.
Because our research domain is a philosophical text and, as such, treats much more of concepts than agents - as it would in a literary or historical text, for instance - we decided to create the two classes of “abstract figures”, which for Marcus Aurelius are notably Men and God (both as concepts and as agents), as well as the one of “agent roles”, for external thinker or personality that are most cited explicitly or referred to implicitly in Meditations.
Finally, we decided to create a specific class for the different “books” (that we call “chapters”) in Meditations, as well as one for “entries” (that we call “fragments”). This latter class allows us to concentrate some of our analysis and queries on individual entries of the books, that are all numbered according to the Oxford University Press edition (it consists of a few sentences of “meditation” on a certain subject or idea).
Ontology formalization
To formalize our ontology, we used the ontology editor Protégé, formalizing the classes mentioned above. Classes have their specific instances of terms in Meditations, such as for “agent role” (Euripides, Epictetus, Homer, …), as well as for conceptual classes and for negative and positive sentiments.
We defined object properties to allow for associations in between the classes, such as “hasAssociatedAgent”, “hasAssociatedConcept”, etc., as well as reused the appropriate generic object properties of the ArCo ontology, such as hasCharacteristic, hasPart, etc. We also created the object properties of “oppositeOf” and “sameAs”, to specify in our ontology logical oppositions (such as conceptual category “death” and its logical opposite instance “life”) and synonyms (such as for “providence” and “god”, in Marcus Aurelius’ formulation of the concept). In a similar fashion, we reused the ArCo data properties of “keyword” and “synonym”, with the respective domains of sentiments and concepts, and the same range of “rdfs:literal”.
The ontology file can be accessed in our Github repository and you can browse the Ontology Specification Draft made with WIDOCO here.
Further development
The ontology can be used to make this sentiment and linguistic/conceptual analysis of Marcus Aurelius’ writings applicable to other philosophical texts, notably Stoic ones. We expect the ontology to be a starting point to further developments in the field of computational literary analysis, notably the ones that are most concerned with the association of “objective” concepts to “subjective” sentiments.
Notable further steps we have identified include:Bibliography
Aurelius, Marcus & Farquharson A.L., (1998) The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Oxford University Press.
Baltzly, Dirk, (2019) Stoicism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/stoicism/>.
Gangemi, Aldo, (2009) Best practices in ontology design. Retrieved on June 18th 2019, <http://sssw.org/2009/slides/SSSW09-AG-slides.pdf>.
Moretti, Franco, (2005) Graph, Maps and Trees. Abstract Models for a Literary History, Verso.
Rutherford, R.B, (1989) The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius: A Study, Oxford University Press.
Weiss, Robin, (2020) Stoicism and its Telos, Volume51, Issue 2-3, <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/meta.12419>.
All text files and extracted data used for the development of the project can be accessed in the OntoMeditation's Github folder, along with the code for constructing the knowledge graph, the extraction of concept keywords and the code for performing sentiment analysis.
All ontology files can be found in the OntoMeditation's Documentation folder here.