Josh Dever at Texas is putting together a philosophy family tree, consisting of (mostly) philosophers related by the Ph.D. advisor relation. By now it has excellent coverage of some corners of the philosophical world, but there are also some big missing areas (e.g. most of Australian and British philosophy) and some key bits of missing information in the corners that are present. Josh has started a blog to gather missing information, and welcomes information either on the blog or by e-mail. It would be good if people could collectively supply as much information as possible. E.g., if you have a Ph.D. in philosophy and this information isn't already there, let Josh know the identity of your advisor, your advisor's advisor, and so on, as well as any advisees, siblings (advisees of your advisor), and so on.
For my part, my main advisor (at Indiana) was Doug Hofstadter, whose advisor was a physicist at Oregon, so I don't go far back on that line. But officially my co-advisor was Mike Dunn, whose advisor (at Pittsburgh) was Nuel Belnap, whose advisor (at Yale) was Frederic Fitch, whose advisor (at Yale) is not currently known (update: Fitch now goes back via F.C.S. Northrop and W.E. Hocking to Josiah Royce, and from there via a few intermediate steps to Kant and Leibniz!) so that's at least a partial hook-up into the body of the tree.

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