Figures
The thinkers, movements and characters, positioned on the referential. Every position is justified.
Movements · 24
Analytic Philosophy1%Treating philosophical problems as knots to untangle: what exactly are we saying, and what actually follows from our words and our reasons?Aristotelianism33%Thinking each being through what it can accomplish: a tradition for which a flourishing life is built through the exercise of reason and the virtues.Buddhism24%Making suffering a practical inquiry: seeking out its causes so as to undo them, through ethics, attention and meditation.Confucianism23%Cultivating oneself to set the world in order: the rites (li 禮), study and humaneness shape the person who can hold a harmonious society together.Cynicism25%Making one's life a provocation against false needs: voluntary poverty and frank speech put conventions to the test.Empiricism24%Requiring every idea about the world to measure itself against experience: observation, not speculation, is what puts our beliefs to the test.The Enlightenment30%Dare to use your own understanding: through reason and enlightenment, humanity can free itself from the tutelage of authority, from superstition and from arbitrary power.Environmental Ethics3%Moving the moral question beyond the human: what do we owe animals, the living world and future generations, and what place should we hold in nature?Epicureanism25%Not multiplying pleasures but defusing the fears that spoil life: happiness as lasting tranquillity.Existentialism23%Starting from lived existence, always in a situation, never finished: a finite freedom shaping itself through its choices, with no instructions provided.German Idealism4%Carrying on the work Kant began, beyond the limits he drew: no longer opposing mind and world, but thinking freedom, nature and history together.Liberalism4%The individual and their liberties first: power is legitimate only when limited, grounded in consent and bounded by rights.Marxism28%Understanding capitalism in order to break free of it: linking the production of wealth to the class conflicts running through society.Phenomenology11%Returning "to the things themselves": describing lived experience as it gives itself to consciousness.Platonism31%What changes does not exhaust the real: seeking the stable forms that make things intelligible, and that orient thought toward the Good.Pragmatism20%An idea is worth the practical difference it makes: the true is what gets verified in inquiry.Rationalism19%Experience informs, but cannot ground necessity: seeking in reason the principles the senses alone cannot guarantee.Romanticism34%Defending what calculation cannot exhaust: inner experience, creative imagination and a living nature, against a world reduced to mechanism.Skepticism8%Suspending judgment before the equal force of opposing arguments, to find tranquillity.Stoicism35%A discipline of judgment first of all: directing effort at what is up to us, without demanding that the world obey.Taoism26%What if we acted better by ceasing to force? Attuning to the dao 道 (the Way) rather than imposing our will on the course of things.Transhumanism8%Extending, augmenting, even abolishing the human condition through technology: aging, disease and death as problems to be solved.Utilitarianism25%Can the good be measured? Judging acts and institutions by their consequences for everyone's well-being, privileging no one.Vedānta (Advaita)19%Does the self-evidence of a separate self survive scrutiny? Recognizing the Self (ātman) as not distinct from the absolute (brahman): a knowledge that liberates.
Philosophers · 42
Thomas Aquinas45%Building summas like cathedrals: joining Christian theology to the resources of Aristotle, convinced that the truths of reason and the truths of faith cannot contradict each other.Aristotle40%From animals to constitutions, observing, distinguishing and classifying: seeking, on a human scale, what makes a flourishing life.Bacon20%Flushing out the idols that distort the mind and questioning nature through experiment: knowledge as a collective work in the service of the human condition.Beauvoir40%Philosophizing from lived experience: womanhood, old age, everything once held to be natural destiny, rethought as a socially shaped situation, and therefore open to change.Bentham36%Judging every institution by its effects: counting the pleasures and pains a law actually produces, rather than appealing to tradition or supposed natural rights.George Berkeley14%Refusing the invisible material support supposed to lie behind things: nothing but minds and their ideas, and God to keep the world from vanishing when we stop looking at it.The Buddha24%A diagnosis, not a pessimism: unsatisfactoriness (dukkha) arises from craving (taṇhā) and the illusion of a self, and there is a path to extinguish it.Camus34%Refusing consolations and despair alike: facing a world that guarantees no meaning, seeking a lucid, rebellious way to live.Confucius38%No one becomes human alone: humaneness (ren 仁) is cultivated through study, the rites and benevolence, as jade is polished.Descartes39%Making doubt a method rather than a defeat: searching beneath everything we think we know for one firm point on which to rebuild.Diogenes of Sinope28%Philosophy in deeds rather than doctrines: using provocation and destitution to lay bare our manufactured needs and the weight of convention.Epictetus28%Slave turned teacher: inner freedom through what is up to us.Epicurus35%Philosophy as a remedy for the fear of the gods, of death and of want: true pleasure is not debauchery but a life free of pain and trouble.Hegel33%Thinking the real as a rational process that advances through its own contradictions: nothing has truth in isolation, all is understood only within the whole, and spirit grasps itself only after the fact.Hume35%The most serene of skeptics: putting human nature through the sieve of experience, finding habit beneath our surest beliefs and feeling beneath our moral judgments.Husserl16%Describing before explaining: provisionally bracketing the world we take for granted, to grasp as closely as possible how it appears to consciousness.Kant41%Setting reason to examine its own powers: distinguishing what it can know from what it can only think, sacrificing neither science nor freedom.Laozi25%Non-action: water, which never struggles, wears down the rock.Leibniz28%Seeking a reason for all that is: even asking why there is something rather than nothing, and why this world among all possible worlds.Locke34%Where do our ideas come from, and where does authority come from? Knowledge must trace back to experience, power to the consent of the governed.Lucretius31%Physics as a poem: singing of atoms, the void and the whole of nature, to free us from the fear of the gods and of death.Machiavelli21%Wresting politics from morality to look it in the face: by what real springs, up to cunning and force, power is seized, founded and kept.Marcus Aurelius45%The emperor who wrote to himself: at the heart of power, training each day to remain just and serene, attuned to the reason of the world.Marx46%Reading ideas through the labour, property and social conflicts that shape them, and making thought a tool for intervening in history.Mill43%How far may society constrain an individual who harms no one? A utilitarian in love with liberty, for whom the common happiness feeds on singular freedoms rather than crushing them.Michel de Montaigne33%"What do I know?": a lived, systemless skepticism that takes the self for its matter.Nāgārjuna21%The dialectician who refuses to turn emptiness into a doctrine: testing every claim that a thing exists by itself, and showing that it holds only through dependence.Nietzsche34%Where do our values come from, and what are they worth? Philosophizing as a physician of culture: sounding out our moralities to tell what affirms life from what denies it.Charles Sanders Peirce18%Asking of every idea what difference it makes in experience: the founder of pragmatism makes thought a collective, corrigible inquiry, oriented toward an agreement to come.Plato43%Writing in dialogues to put our opinions to the test: a movement of ascent from the world that changes toward what does not change, up to the Good.Plotinus29%All things flow from the One beyond being: to philosophize is to ascend back to it, "the flight of the alone to the Alone".Pyrrho13%Nothing is this any more than that: decide nothing, and the soul rests at peace.Rousseau31%A man of the Enlightenment at odds with it: asking what society has made of man, and on what terms a political order might set him free rather than subject him.Sartre38%Tracking freedom in the most concrete of things, a gaze, a moment of shame, an act of bad faith: with no ready-made human nature, existing remains a responsibility without excuse.Schopenhauer54%Taking suffering seriously rather than justifying it: against the blind will-to-live that drives us, art grants truces, compassion grounds morality, renunciation alone delivers.Seneca36%A philosopher by letters, close to power: turning each day's trial, disgrace, exile, death itself, into an exercise of virtue.Sextus Empiricus15%To every thesis, an opposing one of equal strength: wisdom suspends judgment.Śaṅkara20%"Thou art that": the self and the absolute are one, and to know it liberates.Socrates29%The philosopher who wrote nothing: to question relentlessly, hold virtue to be knowledge, and be wise only in knowing oneself ignorant.Spinoza35%Understanding the passions through their causes rather than judging them: suffering less, acting more, and making of that lucidity a joy.Wittgenstein10%Twice he thought he had put an end to philosophy: not a doctrine but an activity, which does not solve problems but dissolves them, by showing that they are born of the traps of our language.Zhuangzi34%Am I a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is a man?
Characters · 4
Antigone8%In the name of unwritten laws, she defies the state's decree.Callicles15%In the Gorgias, he confronts Socrates with the right of the stronger: nature wills that the superior rule, enjoy without restraint, and take more.Meursault9%He feigns neither the emotions nor the reasons expected of him: a strange sincerity that lays bare the weight of convention.Odysseus20%A heroism of cunning and endurance rather than force: the man who crosses all the known world only to regain a single island, and chooses to be mortal.
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