Dilemmas
The atlas, applied.
57 contemporary questions, answered by the atlas's coordinates. For each, the 86 schools are sorted into stances by their attribute signatures — turning the catalogue into a reasoning tool you can open when the question comes up. See the coverage matrix to map which attributes each dilemma exercises, or the argument map to see how stances on one dilemma entail stances on others.
What happens to "you" when you die?
Whether anything of you persists — and in what sense — depends on what you take a person to be.
What makes someone male or female?
Whether sex is a real biological kind, a constructed social category, a relational identity, a label applied to varied phenomena, or a conventional distinction within a deeper unity is the ontological question the contemporary dispute about gender is mostly about.
Should we edit the human germline?
Whether human nature is a given biological kind, a constructed category, a relational achievement, a family-resemblance cluster, or a conventional distinction within deeper unity is the ontological question the policy debate over heritable gene editing is mostly about.
Do you really choose?
If the brain is a physical system and physical systems are governed by laws, then every choice is also a chain of causes — which raises the question of what was really left to choose.
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Addiction looks from one angle like the textbook case of agency failing — a person doing what they don't, in any meaningful sense, want to do. From another angle it looks like agency at work in hard conditions. Which it is depends on what agency is.
Is regret rational?
If the past is fixed and unchangeable, what kind of mental act is regret? An error, a duty, a lesson, a perspective on a moment that is still in some sense present?
What makes someone the same person over time?
When dementia hollows out memory, when a coma resolves with no recall, when you imagine being uploaded — the question of whether the surviving person is still you turns on what kind of thing the 'you' was to begin with.
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Loss of memory, of recognition, of the cognitive patterns that made the person — does this end the person, or merely the person you knew? The answer turns on what makes someone who they are.
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
The Star Trek transporter problem: a machine scans your body atom by atom, transmits the pattern, builds an exact duplicate at the destination, and dismantles the original. Whether you arrive at the destination or die in the scanner is the question; the answer depends on what you are.
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
If you pray for a friend in another city, can the prayer reach them? The answer turns less on whether distance can be spanned than on whether anything beyond natural causation is doing the spanning.
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Thinking of someone and hearing from them moments later. Two friends humming the same obscure song at the same moment in different cities. Whether such patterns ever carry meaning depends on whether the world contains any ordering agency beyond chance.
Are the dead morally present to the living?
Ancestor veneration, intercession with saints, the moral weight of a promise made to someone now gone — these all presuppose that the dead are present in some sense beyond memory. Whether they are turns on whether an observer is the kind of thing that exists in a single moment or across many.
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Contemplative traditions across cultures report that sustained attention reveals a level at which time as ordinary experience knows it does not apply. Whether the report is a real glimpse or a real misdescription depends on what observers can in principle be.
Does prayer change God's mind?
When you petition God for something, are you addressing a personal agent who hears and responds, participating in eternal providence, attuning yourself to what already is, or doing something that doesn't quite map onto petition?
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
The memory you don't retrieve, the conversation you can't remember, the face you no longer recognise — is the forgetting a loss of something real, or just the routine operation of a finite mind?
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
When someone forgives, does the offense actually go away — erased, undone, no longer a fact — or does forgiveness reframe a wrong that persists exactly as it always was?
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
You remember the past but anticipate the future. Whether that asymmetry tracks something deep about time, or just something contingent about how minds happen to be wired, depends on what direction time has.
Are there indivisible units of experience?
Whiteheadian actual occasions, Buddhist moments of mind, Kabbalistic letter-cognitions, IIT phi-units — or the unbroken Jamesian stream? The atomism of experience cuts across naturalism and theism alike.
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Engrams and traces — or continuous re-narration each time you remember? The cognitive-science debate has a theological cousin: divine memory holding each hair, or the ancestors' continuous remembering.
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Schools disagree not just about what is real, but about what kind of practice gets us reliable access to it.
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
Different traditions take fundamentally different things to be the basic moral-political unit.
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
What kind of thing is a true claim, and how does it relate to the standpoint from which it is made?
Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal?
Whether the goal of life is reached one soul at a time or by the community together — or whether neither is the right frame.