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.
When does a person begin?
The political question of abortion sits atop an older ontological one: at what point does there exist a someone — a being with moral standing — rather than merely the materials from which one will form?
What is marriage?
Behind every disagreement about how marriage should be defined is a prior disagreement about what kind of thing it is — a given order to be recognized, a practice to be negotiated, or a web of relations to be woven.
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.
What is our place in nature?
Whether humans are masters of nature, members of nature, or makers of nature is not a question climate science can settle. It depends on what nature is, what we are, and what kind of relationship is possible between us.
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
Across millennia, more humans have claimed to know things by revelation than by any other route. Whether they were knowing anything depends on what knowing is.
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 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.
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
If God knows what you will do tomorrow, does your tomorrow-self choose freely? The classical problem of foreknowledge turns on whether the divine vantage stands outside time or inside it.
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?
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
If we had perfect information about who someone was — their connectome, their behavioral patterns, their history — could we, in principle, restore them? The question is partly engineering, but the ceiling on the engineering is metaphysical.
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 world created from nothing?
Creatio ex nihilo is one of the most distinctive Western-theological claims. Whether matter was created from nothing, eternally exists, or is sustained moment-by-moment turns on what kind of thing matter is.
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.
Does history have a direction or meaning?
Is history the unfolding of progress, the recovery of lost truth, a cyclical recurrence, the approach of consummation — or none of these?
What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize?
Religious traditions differ not only in what they believe, but in how authority is structured — and what counts as the right kind of argument.
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.