Philoscopia

The model

Before placing anyone, Philoscopia tells apart three registers of what a person, a work or a movement commits to: what it holds to be true, what it holds to be good, and what it does. The axes of the referential belong to the first two, the practices to the third.

Descriptive beliefs

what is

principles of explanation

These are our theories about reality: what we hold to be true, regardless of what we may wish. They answer the question “what is the case?”. A description can be true or false, confirmed or refuted.

“Consciousness arises from the brain”, “history follows laws”, “nothing is created”.

Prescriptive beliefs

what ought to be

principles of evaluation

These are our values, ends and rules: what we judge we ought to aim at. They answer “what should we pursue, do, respect?”. A norm is not verified like a fact: it is owned, argued for, contested.

“Promises must be kept”, “liberty outweighs security”, “nature has value in itself”.

Practices

what one does

living the belief

Believing is not yet living. A practice is a concrete routine, inherited from a philosopher or a movement, that puts a belief to the test of action: an evening exercise, a discipline of attention, a rule of life. It is judged neither true nor right, but kept or not, fruitful or not.

The Stoic evening review, meditation, keeping a journal.

In Philoscopia

Every axis carries a Descriptive or Prescriptive badge, depending on the register of its question. The foundation graph shows which descriptions support which values. Practices connect those beliefs to gestures you can try.


From fact to value

The two registers do not collapse into one: from a fact alone, one cannot mechanically derive what ought to be done, this is Hume's distinction between is and ought. Yet they are not strangers: a descriptive belief often grounds a prescriptive one. Those supports are what the foundation graph maps.

See the foundation graph →Browse the axes →

The four relations

The axes are sorted by what they put at stake: our relation to truth, to ourselves, to others, to the world. These are four orientations, not four airtight boxes. One question often touches several: freedom engages the self and others, the body engages the self and the world. It is then filed under the relation that dominates. Each one cuts across the descriptive and the prescriptive alike: we can describe what the self is, and judge how to conduct ourselves toward it.

Relation to truthHow we seek the true and weigh what deserves to be believed: how we know, what we can hold for certain, the place of doubt, the role of science and reason. At bottom: what is truth, and can we really reach it?
Relation to oneselfThe way we look at our own existence: who I am, what makes my identity, what my freedom and desires are worth, what a good life is. This is the most intimate relation, the conduct of one's own life.
Relation to othersWhat comes into play the moment others do: what we owe one another, the just and the unjust, the rules of living together, power, the bonds of love and friendship. Morality and politics meet here.
Relation to the worldOur place in what surrounds us and exceeds us: nature and the living, matter and time, the technology that reshapes the world, but also the beautiful and the sacred. In short, what there is beyond us.

This division into four relations is not the usual scholarly classification (epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and so on). That one is precise, but it mostly speaks to specialists. We preferred a split that speaks to everyone, starting from what each of us puts at stake in life, and that spreads the questions fairly evenly across the four relations.

Reading the colours

In Philoscopia's texts, some words are coloured. The colour is not decoration: it signals the gesture of thought the word engages.

ConceiveConcepts: the vocabulary of thought, a term whose definition you can open.
QuestionAxes, problems and objections: what puts a certainty in question or contests a position.
AffirmTheses and beliefs, and those who hold them: philosophers, movements, characters.
JustifyArguments: the reasons that support a position.
Put to the testThought experiments, situations and journeys: a concrete confrontation with a problem.
Put into practicePractices: concrete gestures, inherited from the philosophers, that you can try.

A useful distinction: in a text, a word's colour tells its role (a question, a position, an argument, a concept). On the maps and filters, an axis's colour tells something else entirely, its relation (to truth, to oneself, to others, to the world). The same axis thus appears in red when cited as a question, and takes on its relation's hue when placed on a map. Other elements, such as examples or quotations, stay a neutral grey.