Time Comprehended in Thoughts: The World Congress of Philosophy Collection

This paper introduces the World Congress of Philosophy Collection, a digital corpus of approximately 21000 conference proceedings of the fourteen International Congresses of Philosophy (1900-1968) and the subsequent eleven World Congresses of Philosophy (1973- 2024), which might be seen as a striking confirmation of Hegel’s notion that philosophy com- prehends its own time in thoughts. The argument laid out in this paper consists of four steps. After (1) a brief historical consideration of the twenty-five meetings held from 1900 to 2024, the attempt is made (2) of fine-tuning their outputs in terms of a consistent and well-formed corpus that is apt to be subjected to qualitative and quantitative investigations, which leads to (3) the suggestion of questions whose perusal might eventually lead to shaping (4) a concep- tual frame of reference that accounts for complex tasks such as taking a global perspective, modeling concepts, investigating the canon and cross-cultural philosophizing.