What is Ideonomy?
Ideonomy is, by its shortest definition, the science of ideas. It is the pure and applied study of ideas and their laws, and of the use of those laws to describe, generate, compare, and investigate the ideas related to any subject, problem, or thing.
Where the established sciences each examine ideas within their own domain, ideonomy is concerned with ideas of the greatest possible generality: notions that are independent of any single discipline yet applicable across all of them. Its ambition is to treat the qualitative laws of the world as systematically as mathematics treats the quantitative ones, to make ideas themselves the subject matter of organized knowledge and methodical inquiry.
“Just as chemistry includes organized knowledge about molecules, and biology involves systematic inquiry into the nature of organisms, so ideonomy encompasses organized knowledge of, and systematic inquiry regarding, ideas.” — Patrick Gunkel, “An Introduction to Ideonomy,” Ideonomy: Introduction, Foundations, and Applications of the Science of Ideas.
The project grew out of decades of work by the scholar Patrick Gunkel, who developed ideonomy's methods, divisions, and an enormous body of charts, lists, and monographs. It was compiled, hosted, and organized at MIT under the direction of Prof. Whitman Richards. The original introductions, monographs, essays, and hundreds of scanned drawings and maps remain available in full through the archive linked below.