School #17
Pragmatic Realism
Putnam
Pragmatic Realism combines a realist commitment to a mind-independent world with the pragmatist insight that our access to that world is always shaped by human interests, concepts, and purposes. Hilary Putnam developed this position across several works, most notably 'Reason, Truth and History' (1981), 'The Many Faces of Realism' (1987), and 'Realism with a Human Face' (1990). Putnam rejected both naive metaphysical realism (a "God's eye view" of reality) and anti-realist relativism, arguing instead for "internal realism": the world is real and constrains our theories, but there is no single, uniquely correct description of it — different conceptual schemes can be equally valid ways of "carving up" the same mind-independent reality. Truth is idealized rational acceptability, not correspondence with a fixed, scheme-independent world.
Worldview
The pragmatic realist occupies a carefully balanced position between naive objectivism and corrosive relativism. The world is genuinely real and independent of thought — it pushes back, constrains inquiry, and refuses to bend to mere wishes — but no single description of it is uniquely, exhaustively correct. Different conceptual schemes carve up the same reality in different but equally legitimate ways, and truth is not a mirror-image of a scheme-independent world but an idealized form of rational acceptability. This produces an intellectual temperament that is both confident and humble: confident that inquiry tracks something real, humble about any particular theory's claim to finality. The pragmatic realist trusts science and common sense alike, without confusing either for the last word. The framework classifies this as None: pragmatic realism takes no stance requiring a personal deity or cosmic ordering principle; inquiry runs through natural and social causation alone. The framework reads this as Constructed moral authority: warranted assertibility and intersubjective inquiry constitute what counts as authoritative; no Scripture, Tradition, or pure Reason is granted finality outside the inquiring community.
Moral Implications
Pragmatic realism supports a pluralistic moral vision in which multiple ethical frameworks can be valid responses to the same moral reality. The pragmatic realist rejects both moral absolutism — the claim that there is exactly one correct ethical system — and moral relativism — the claim that all moral views are equally arbitrary. Instead, moral reasoning is a form of practical inquiry: one tests ethical principles by their consequences for human flourishing, revises them in light of experience, and acknowledges that different moral vocabularies may illuminate different aspects of the same complex moral landscape. Responsibility is grounded in the real consequences of action, not in conformity to an abstract moral law.
Practical Implications
Pragmatic realism supports interdisciplinary inquiry, pluralistic public discourse, and evidence-based policy that remains open to revision. In science, it encourages methodological pluralism — different methods may be appropriate for different domains — while maintaining that all inquiry is answerable to a mind-independent reality. In politics, the pragmatic realist favors democratic deliberation and institutional checks on dogmatism, since no single perspective can claim a monopoly on truth. In technology and environmental policy, this orientation supports adaptive management: implementing the best available solutions while remaining ready to correct course as new evidence emerges.
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I. Time
Time is emergent and practically relevant — it exists as a real feature of the world but our understanding of it is shaped by its utility for human inquiry and action. Time is continuous, linear, and uni-directional as it functions in practice. Its extent is infinite in the sense that inquiry has no final horizon.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Linear
Dimensionality: One
Direction: Uni-directional
✦
II. Space
Space is emergent and practically relevant — it is real but understood through the lens of practical engagement. It is flat, finite, local, and three-dimensional as experienced in ordinary action. The pragmatic realist accepts the reality of space without committing to a purely substantivalist or purely relational metaphysics.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Curvature: Flat
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
◉
III. Matter
Matter is emergent and practically relevant — it is real in the sense that it resists and responds to human action, but our descriptions of it are shaped by practical purposes. Matter is conserved and local as experienced in inquiry. The pragmatic realist treats material reality as genuine without claiming to have captured its ultimate nature.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Emergent
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
◎
IV. Observer
The observer engages with a real, independently existing world, but always practically — from a particular place, at a particular time, with particular purposes. Knowledge is not a mirror of reality but a tool forged in the encounter between an active organism and a resistant environment. Direct perception is immediate, but practically useful knowledge accumulates over time and continues to guide future action. Total knowledge is neither required nor achievable; what matters is what works. The observer is embodied and active, and multiple observers share a common world whose features are discovered through ongoing practical engagement.
Attributes
Time Instance: Single
Space Instance: Single
Extent of Knowledge: Mediated
Retainment of Knowledge: Partial
Physicality: Embodied
Agency: Active
Number: Plural
Metaphysical Agency: None
Moral Authority: Constructed
Theological Method: Pragmatic-civic
⚡
V. Energy
Energy is substantival and practically relevant — it is a real feature of the world understood through its role in scientific inquiry and practical action. Conservation holds as a well-confirmed regularity. Dispersibility is irreversible, grounding practical constraints on action.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dispersibility: Irreversible
⧉
VI. Information
Information is validated through its functional role in inquiry and practical success. It is relational — defined by its use in context rather than existing in isolation. The framework distinguishes scales: information is conserved at the cosmic scale because shared inquiry accumulates a stable, intersubjective record, but non-conserved at the personal-identity scale — the inquirer's pattern dissolves at death, with only the public products of inquiry persisting.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational
Cosmic Conservation: Conserved
Personal Conservation: Non-conserved
Granularity: Continuous
Films Reading Through This School (1)
Works that name Pragmatic Realism in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
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Realism with a Human Face (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 1990
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville · Volume I 1835; Volume II 1840 (based on Tocqueville's 1831–32 American journey)
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Karl R. Popper · Composed 1938–1943 in New Zealand exile; published 1945 (2 vols)
Theory of Communicative Action
Jürgen Habermas · 1981 (German, 2 vols)
The Subjection of Women (Late)
John Stuart Mill · Written 1860–61 with Harriet Taylor Mill's collaboration; published 1869
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Early-to-late (he revised it throughout his life))
Adam Smith · 1759 (1st edition); 1790 (6th and definitive edition with substantial additions)
Gettysburg Address (Mature (Civil War))
Abraham Lincoln · November 19, 1863 (delivered 4½ months after the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863)
The Irony of American History (Late (Niebuhr's major Cold War political-theological book))
Reinhold Niebuhr · 1952
First Inaugural Address (Mid (the inauguration after twelve years of Republican presidency))
William J. Clinton · January 20, 1993
Six Crises (Mid (pre-presidential, post-1960 defeat))
Richard M. Nixon · 1962 (after Nixon's 1960 presidential defeat to Kennedy)
My Life (Late)
William J. Clinton · 2004
Promises to Keep (Mid)
Joseph R. Biden Jr. · 2007
Trump: The Art of the Deal (Early)
Donald J. Trump · 1987
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Late)
Adam Smith · 1776 (first ed.); five revised editions in Smith's lifetime
Two Treatises of Government (Late)
John Locke · Written c. 1679–82; published anonymously 1689
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792 (London, six weeks)
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Mid-late (after The Human Condition, before The Life of the Mind))
Hannah Arendt · 1963 (New Yorker articles 1962-63, then book)
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Mid (Arendt's breakthrough book))
Hannah Arendt · 1951 (with later editions adding new prefaces and material through 1968)
On Revolution (Late (after Eichmann in Jerusalem))
Hannah Arendt · 1963
Moral Man and Immoral Society (Early-mid (Niebuhr's breakthrough book that established Christian realism))
Reinhold Niebuhr · 1932
Principles of Political Economy (Mid (Mill's major economic work))
John Stuart Mill · 1848 (1st edition); revised through 1871 (7th edition)
A Time for Choosing (Early (launched Reagan's political career))
Ronald W. Reagan · October 27, 1964 (broadcast nationally on behalf of Goldwater)
Tear Down This Wall (Late (Reagan presidency at its rhetorical peak))
Ronald W. Reagan · June 12, 1987 (delivered at the Brandenburg Gate, West Berlin)
An American Life (Late)
Ronald W. Reagan · 1990
The Many Faces of Realism (Mid)
Hilary Putnam · 1987
The Art of War (Early)
Sun Tzu (Sunzi) · 5th c. BCE (Warring States era)
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Late)
John Maynard Keynes · 1936
Summer Meditations (Late (the first major post-1989 reflection on the transition from dissidence to governance))
Václav Havel · 1991 (Letní přemítání, composed during Havel's first eighteen months as Czechoslovak president after the November 1989 Velvet Revolution)
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill · 1859
A Theory of Justice
John Rawls · 1971; revised edition 1999
An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Late)
John Henry Newman · 1870
Xunzi
Xun Kuang (Xunzi) · c. 280–230 BC
De Cive (Early)
Thomas Hobbes · 1642 (Latin, Paris); English translation by Hobbes himself 1651
The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt · 1958
Novum Organum
Francis Bacon · 1620 (London; intended as Part II of the never-completed Instauratio Magna)
A Letter Concerning Toleration (Late)
John Locke · Written in Latin 1685 in Holland; published anonymously 1689 (Latin and English)
Political Liberalism (Late)
John Rawls · 1993 (revised 1996, with new introduction)
The Will to Believe (Mid (between Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience))
William James · 1897 (title essay, addressed to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown, 1896)
The Copernican Revolution (Early (Kuhn's first book))
Thomas Kuhn · 1957
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Early (the breakthrough work))
Jürgen Habermas · 1962 (habilitation thesis; English translation 1989)
The Plague (Mid (between The Stranger and The Rebel))
Albert Camus · 1947
Madness and Civilization (Early (Foucault's breakthrough work, his doctoral dissertation))
Michel Foucault · 1961 (Foucault's doctoral dissertation)
The Birth of the Clinic (Early-mid (between Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things))
Michel Foucault · 1963
De Brevitate Vitae (Mid)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 49 AD
Tristes Tropiques (Mid (Lévi-Strauss's most widely read book))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1955
Reason, Truth and History (Mid (the major mid-career book, the systematic statement of internal realism))
Hilary Putnam · 1981
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Early (the first of Douglass's three autobiographies))
Frederick Douglass · 1845
Tradition and the Individual Talent (Early (Eliot's major early critical statement))
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1919 (first published in The Egoist, September-December 1919)
Why Not the Best? (Mid (pre-presidential))
James Earl Carter Jr. · 1975 (campaign biography for the 1976 presidential campaign)
The Power of the Powerless (Mid (Havel as principal Charter 77 dissident))
Václav Havel · 1978 (circulated in samizdat in Czechoslovakia)
Provincial Letters (Late)
Blaise Pascal · 1656-57
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Mid-late)
David Hume · 1751
Achieving Our Country (Late)
Richard Rorty · 1998
Representation and Reality (Mid)
Hilary Putnam · 1988
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Late)
John Locke · 1693
De Tranquillitate Animi (Mid-late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 60 AD
De Vita Beata (Mid-late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 58 AD
The Cancer Journals (Mid)
Audre Lorde · 1980
Democracy and Education (Mid)
John Dewey · 1916
Art as Experience (Late)
John Dewey · 1934 (William James Lectures at Harvard, 1931)
The Quest for Certainty (Late)
John Dewey · 1929 (Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, 1928-29)
The Fixation of Belief (Early)
Charles Sanders Peirce · 1877 (Popular Science Monthly, November)
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Late)
Michael Polanyi · 1958 (Gifford Lectures 1951-52 at Aberdeen)
The Uses of Argument (Early)
Stephen Toulmin · 1958
Two Concepts of Liberty (Mid)
Isaiah Berlin · 1958 (Inaugural Lecture as Chichele Professor at Oxford)
The Hedgehog and the Fox (Mid)
Isaiah Berlin · 1953
Muqaddimah (Late)
Ibn Khaldūn (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān) · 1377
Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Late)
Thomas Reid · 1785
The Prince (Il Principe) (Late)
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1513 (first printed 1532)
Discourses on Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio) (Late)
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1517 (published 1531)
The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois) (Late)
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu · 1748
Speech Acts (Early)
John R. Searle · 1969
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Mid)
Marshall McLuhan · 1964
Mind, Self, and Society (Late)
George Herbert Mead · 1934 (posthumous; lectures 1928-30)
The Education of Henry Adams (Late)
Henry Adams · 1907 (private printing); 1918 (public)
Twenty Years at Hull-House (Late)
Jane Addams · 1910
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Mid)
Erving Goffman · 1959
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Late)
Robert D. Putnam · 2000
Full Catastrophe Living (Late)
Jon Kabat-Zinn · 1990 (revised 2013)
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Late)
Daniel Kahneman · 2011
The Black Swan (Late)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2007
How to Do Things with Words (Late)
J.L. Austin · 1955 (William James Lectures at Harvard); 1962 (book, posthumous)
The Blue and Brown Books (Mid)
Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1933-35 (dictations); 1958 (published posthumously)
A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Mid)
Claude Shannon · 1948 (Bell System Technical Journal)
The Character of Physical Law (Mid)
Richard Feynman · 1964 (lectures); 1965 (book)
The Road to Serfdom (Mid)
Friedrich Hayek · 1944
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Late)
Joseph Schumpeter · 1942
Childhood and Society (Mid)
Erik Erikson · 1950 (1st ed.); 1963 (rev. 2nd ed.)
The Story of Art (Mid)
Ernst Gombrich · 1950 (1st ed.); 1995 (16th ed.)
Sense and Sensibilia (Late)
J. L. Austin · 1947-58 (lectures); 1962 (posthumous, reconstructed by G. J. Warnock)
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (Early (Wollstonecraft's first published book, written from her experience as a governess and a school proprietress))
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1787 (J. Johnson, London)
De Re Publica (Mid-mature (Cicero's political philosophical synthesis, composed during the breakdown of the late Republic))
Marcus Tullius Cicero · 54-51 BC (composed during a period of political withdrawal from active life)
Colloquia (Mature (the work that grew through Erasmus's most productive decades and was repeatedly enlarged))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1518 (first edition Familiarium Colloquiorum Formulae); enlarged 1519, 1522, 1524, 1526, 1529, 1533
On Conjectures (Mature (the systematic epistemological development of the docta-ignorantia framework))
Nicholas of Cusa (Nicolaus Cusanus) · c. 1442-43 (composed shortly after De Docta Ignorantia, dedicated to Cardinal Cesarini)
Custer Died for Your Sins (Mature (Deloria's breakthrough book, written at 36))
Vine Deloria Jr. · 1969 (Macmillan)
Traité sur la tolérance (Late (the campaign-treatise of the Ferney period))
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1763 (Traité sur la tolérance à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas)
Julie (Mature (the literary high-point of Rousseau's career, between Social Contract and Émile))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1761 (Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres de deux amants, habitants d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, Amsterdam)
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Late (Seneca's last completed major work, composed in retirement))
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · 63-65 CE (Seneca's last years, after retirement from Nero's court and before his forced suicide)
De Beneficiis (Mid-mature (composed during Seneca's most influential political-philosophical period))
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 56-62 CE (Nero's court, before Seneca's retirement)
De Otio (Late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 62 CE (composed at the time of Seneca's retirement from Nero's court)
Rhetoric (Mature)
Aristotle · c. 350-330 BC (composed during Aristotle's mature Lyceum period)
Topics (Mid-mature)
Aristotle · c. 350-340 BC (one of Aristotle's earlier mature logical works)
Three Guineas (Late)
Virginia Woolf · 1938 (Hogarth Press)
Disturbing the Peace (Late-dissident (composed three years before the Velvet Revolution))
Václav Havel · 1985-86 (long interview composed by mail between Havel in Prague and Karel Hvížďala in West Germany)
The American Scholar (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1837 (delivered August 31, 1837, at the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard; first published as An Oration Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, 1837)
Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study (Mature)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1811 (first edition); substantially revised 1830 (second edition)
A Pluralistic Universe (Late)
William James · 1909 (Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, May 1908)
Brave New World Revisited (Late)
Aldous Huxley · 1958
Principal Doctrines (Mature)
Epicurus · c. 300 BC
The Inward Journey (Late-mature)
Howard Thurman · 1961
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes · 1651
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
John Locke · 1689 (first ed.); fourth ed. with significant revisions 1700
Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill · 1861 (Fraser's Magazine); 1863 (book form)
Politics
Aristotle · c. 335 BC (lecture course, Lyceum)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1962 (1st ed.); 1970 (2nd ed. with postscript); 1996 (3rd ed.)
A History of Western Philosophy (Late)
Bertrand Russell · 1945
After Virtue
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1981 (1st ed.); 1984 (2nd ed.); 2007 (3rd ed., with new prologue)
Theological-Political Treatise (Early)
Baruch Spinoza · 1670 (anonymously, with false imprint)
Crito (Early)
Plato · c. 399–395 BC (composed shortly after Socrates's death)
Pragmatism (Late)
William James · 1907 (from 1906 Lowell Lectures, Boston)
The Rebel (Late)
Albert Camus · 1951
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Mid-late (the second of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1988
The History of Sexuality (Late (his last major project))
Michel Foucault · 1976 (vol. 1); 1984 (vols. 2-3, shortly before Foucault's death); vol. 4 (Confessions of the Flesh) published posthumously 2018
The Nature and Destiny of Man (Mid-late (Niebuhr's major systematic work))
Reinhold Niebuhr · 1941 (vol. I, Human Nature); 1943 (vol. II, Human Destiny) — based on the Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh, 1939
Dependent Rational Animals (Late (the explicit Thomist completion of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1999
The Social Contract (Late (after the two Discourses; the political conclusion of Rousseau's mature thought))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Mid (between the First Discourse and the Social Contract))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1755 (submitted to the 1754 essay competition of the Académie de Dijon, on the question of the origin and justification of inequality)
The Principles of Psychology (Mid (the major early work; foundational for both psychology and pragmatist philosophy))
William James · 1890 (after twelve years of writing; James later said he should not have spent so much time on it)
The Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean
Confucius (Kongzi) · Originally chapters of the Book of Rites (Li Ji, c. 1st c. BC); elevated to the Four Books by Zhu Xi (1130-1200) in the Song dynasty
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Late (third volume of the After Virtue trilogy))
Alasdair MacIntyre · 1990 (the Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 1988)
Letter from Birmingham Jail (Mid (the canonical theological-political document))
Martin Luther King Jr. · April 16, 1963 (written in jail in response to a published statement by eight Alabama clergymen criticising King's direct-action methods)
The Need for Roots (Posthumous)
Simone Weil · 1943 (written for Free France in London in the months before Weil's death; published posthumously 1949)
Hind Swaraj (Early (the founding text of Gandhi's mature political-philosophical vision))
Mohandas K. Gandhi · 1909 (written aboard the Kildonan Castle in ten days during the voyage from London to South Africa)
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Late-mid (looking back over the formative years))
Mohandas K. Gandhi · 1925-29 (originally serialised in the weekly Navajivan; the chapters cover Gandhi's life through the early Indian campaigns up to 1921)
Sister Outsider (Mid (the major prose collection of Lorde's career))
Audre Lorde · 1984 (collecting essays and speeches from the 1970s and early 1980s)
No Future Without Forgiveness (Late (the major reflective work after the TRC))
Desmond Tutu · 1999 (the personal-theological reflection on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1995-98)
Critique of Dialectical Reason (Late (Sartre's major late philosophical work))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1960 (vol. I); vol. II unfinished, published posthumously 1985
Crime and Punishment (Mid (the first of Dostoevsky's great late novels))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1866 (serialised in The Russian Messenger)
Notes from Underground (Mid (the transition into the great late period))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1864
The Fall (Late (Camus's last completed novel; the Nobel followed in 1957))
Albert Camus · 1956
The Archaeology of Knowledge (Mid (methodological transition between archaeological and genealogical phases))
Michel Foucault · 1969
A System of Logic (Early (Mill's first major book, the foundation of his philosophical reputation))
John Stuart Mill · 1843 (Mill's first major book); revised through 1872 (8th edition)
Praise of Folly (Mid (Erasmus's most widely read book))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1509 (composed during a visit to Thomas More); 1511 (first published)
Adagia (Long (composed across Erasmus's entire mature career))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1500 (1st edition, c. 800 adages); 1536 (final edition, c. 4,151 adages)
Psychological Types (Mid (the major systematic work after his 1912-13 break with Freud))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1921
Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Mid-late (mature systematic statement))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1933 (essay collection, English translation by Cary F. Baynes)
The Interpretation of Dreams (Early (the founding work of psychoanalysis))
Sigmund Freud · 1899 (dated 1900); revised through 1929 (8th edition)
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Early-mid (after the Interpretation of Dreams))
Sigmund Freud · 1905; revised through 1924
Mrs Dalloway (Mid (the first major modernist novel of Woolf's maturity))
Virginia Woolf · 1925
To the Lighthouse (Mid (Woolf at the height of her powers))
Virginia Woolf · 1927
Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Late (the major late doctrinal-legal book))
Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí) · 1873 (in 'Akká, the prison-city where Bahá'u'lláh was exiled)
The Savage Mind (Mid (the systematic statement of structural anthropology))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1962
What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (Mid (Douglass at the height of his oratorical powers))
Frederick Douglass · July 5, 1852 (delivered at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, NY, to the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society)
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Late (the mature systematic statement of archetypal psychology))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1934-55 (essays composed across two decades); 1959 (compiled as Volume 9, Part 1 of the Collected Works)
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Early (preceding the more famous 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman))
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1790 (the first major published response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France)
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1989
Gravitation (Mid-late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1973
A Cyborg Manifesto (Mid)
Donna Haraway · 1985 (first published in Socialist Review)
Beloved (Mid (the Pulitzer-winning major novel))
Toni Morrison · 1987
Playing in the Dark (Mid-late)
Toni Morrison · 1992 (William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard, 1990)
The Lion and the Jewel (Early)
Wole Soyinka · 1959
Aké: The Years of Childhood (Mid)
Wole Soyinka · 1981
Eudemian Ethics
Aristotle · c. 350 BC
Man's Search for Meaning (Mid-late)
Viktor E. Frankl · 1946 (German original); 1959 (English translation)
Anasakti Yoga: The Gita According to Gandhi (Mid-late)
Mohandas K. Gandhi · 1929-32 (translations and commentaries; collected as Anasakti Yoga 1930)
Letters to Olga (Mid (composed during Havel's 1979-83 imprisonment))
Václav Havel · 1979-83 (letters from prison)
The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (Late)
Imre Lakatos · 1978 (posthumous; key essays from 1968-71)
Patterns of Discovery (Early)
Norwood Russell Hanson · 1958
Essays on Actions and Events (Mid)
Donald Davidson · 1980 (essays 1963-78)
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Mid)
Donald Davidson · 1984 (essays 1965-83)
Making It Explicit (Mid)
Robert Brandom · 1994
Reflections on the Revolution in France (Late)
Edmund Burke · 1790
The Federalist Papers (Mid)
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay · 1787-88 (Independent Journal, New York Packet, Daily Advertiser)
Spheres of Justice (Mid)
Michael Walzer · 1983
The Concept of the Political (Mid)
Carl Schmitt · 1932 (revised from 1927 essay; English 1976)
Discourses (Diatribai) (Mid)
Epictetus (recorded by Arrian) · c. 108 CE
Enchiridion (Handbook) (Late)
Epictetus (compiled by Arrian) · c. 125 CE
Two New Sciences (Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, intorno à Due Nuove Scienze) (Late)
Galileo Galilei · 1638
The Sceptical Chymist (Mid)
Robert Boyle · 1661
New Science (Late)
Giambattista Vico · 1725 (1st edn); 1730 (2nd); 1744 (3rd, definitive)
Candide (Candide, ou l'Optimisme) (Late)
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1759
Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience) (Early)
Henri Bergson · 1889 (doctoral thesis)
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (Early)
William Wordsworth · 1800 (1st version); 1802 (expanded)
Consciousness Explained (Mid)
Daniel C. Dennett · 1991
The Construction of Social Reality (Late)
John R. Searle · 1995
An Essay on Free Will (Mid)
Peter van Inwagen · 1983
On Bullshit (Late)
Harry G. Frankfurt · 1986 (Raritan); 2005 (book)
Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Late)
Kwasi Wiredu · 1996
We Have Never Been Modern (Nous n'avons jamais été modernes) (Mid)
Bruno Latour · 1991
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Late)
Bruno Latour · 2005
A Sand County Almanac (Late)
Aldo Leopold · 1949 (posthumous)
The End of History and the Last Man (Mid)
Francis Fukuyama · 1992
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Mid)
Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1979
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Mid)
Mary Midgley · 1978
The Social Construction of What? (Late)
Ian Hacking · 1999
Common Sense (Mid)
Thomas Paine · 1776 (January)
The Souls of Black Folk (Mid)
W.E.B. Du Bois · 1903
A Theology for the Social Gospel (Late)
Walter Rauschenbusch · 1917
The Long Loneliness (Late)
Dorothy Day · 1952
A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (Mid)
Fung Yu-lan (Feng Youlan) · 1948
Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (Dongxi wenhua ji qi zhexue) (Early)
Liang Shuming · 1921
The Importance of Living (Mid)
Lin Yutang · 1937
The First and Last Freedom (Mid)
Jiddu Krishnamurti · 1954
Being Peace (Late)
Thich Nhat Hanh · 1987
Rerum Novarum (Late)
Pope Leo XIII · 1891 (15 May)
Don Quixote (El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha) (Late)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605 (Part I); 1615 (Part II)
Gulliver's Travels (Late)
Jonathan Swift · 1726
The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (La Théorie physique: son objet, sa structure) (Late)
Pierre Duhem · 1906
Science and Hypothesis (La Science et l'hypothèse) (Late)
Henri Poincaré · 1902
The Essential Tension (Late)
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1977
A Room of One's Own (Late)
Virginia Woolf · 1929
Middlemarch (Late)
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) · 1871-72
1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (Late)
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) · 1949
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Late)
Pema Chödrön (Deirdre Blomfield-Brown) · 1997
Raja Yoga: Conquering the Internal Nature (Late)
Swami Vivekananda · 1896
The Language Instinct (Late)
Steven Pinker · 1994
Animal Liberation (Mid)
Peter Singer · 1975
Escape from Freedom (Mid)
Erich Fromm · 1941
The Sociological Imagination (Mid)
C. Wright Mills · 1959
The Social Construction of Reality (Mid)
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann · 1966
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (La Distinction) (Mid)
Pierre Bourdieu · 1979
The Culture of Narcissism (Late)
Christopher Lasch · 1979
Liquid Modernity (Late)
Zygmunt Bauman · 2000
The Fall of Public Man (Mid)
Richard Sennett · 1977
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Late)
Jonathan Haidt · 2012
Long Walk to Freedom (Late)
Nelson Mandela · 1994
The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (Mid)
Viktor Frankl · 1946
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Le Capital au XXIe siècle) (Late)
Thomas Piketty · 2013 (French); 2014 (English)
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Late)
Naomi Klein · 2007
Second Treatise of Government (Late)
John Locke · 1689
An Essay on the Principle of Population (Late)
Thomas Robert Malthus · 1798 (1st edn); 1803 (rev. 2nd edn)
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (Late)
David Ricardo · 1817
The Methods of Ethics (Late)
Henry Sidgwick · 1874 (1st edn); 1907 (7th, definitive)
The Concept of Mind (Mid)
Gilbert Ryle · 1949
Intentionality (Mid)
John Searle · 1983
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Late)
Alan Turing · 1950 (Mind)
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Late)
Norbert Wiener · 1948 (2nd ed. 1961)
The Growth of Biological Thought (Late)
Ernst Mayr · 1982
Wonderful Life (Late)
Stephen Jay Gould · 1989
The Double Helix (Mid)
James D. Watson · 1968
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Late)
Edward O. Wilson · 1975
Experiments on Plant Hybridization (Late)
Gregor Mendel · 1866 (published in proceedings of Brünn Natural History Society)
Traité élémentaire de chimie (Late)
Antoine Lavoisier · 1789
The Order of Time (Late)
Carlo Rovelli · 2017 (Italian); 2018 (English)
Descartes' Error (Late)
António Damásio · 1994
Mozi (Early)
Mozi (and Mohist school) · 5th-4th c. BCE (Warring States era)
The Cherry Orchard (Late)
Anton Chekhov · 1903 (composed); 1904 (premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre)
History of the Peloponnesian War (Early)
Thucydides · c. 431-411 BCE (unfinished at Thucydides's death)
The Annals (Late)
Tacitus (Publius Cornelius Tacitus) · c. 116-120 CE (later years of Trajan, reign of Hadrian)
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Late)
Fernand Braudel · 1949 (1st edn); 1966 (2nd edn revised)
Prison Notebooks (Late)
Antonio Gramsci · 1929-35 (composed in fascist prison); 1948-51 (posthumous Italian publication)
The State and Revolution (Late)
Vladimir Lenin · 1917 (composed in Finland, on the eve of the October Revolution)
Course in General Linguistics (Late)
Ferdinand de Saussure · 1906-11 (lectures at Geneva); 1916 (posthumous from students' notes)
The Interpretation of Cultures (Late)
Clifford Geertz · 1973
The Logic of Practice (Late)
Pierre Bourdieu · 1980 (French); 1990 (English)
Motivation and Personality (Mid)
Abraham Maslow · 1954 (1st ed.); 1970 (rev. 2nd ed.)
Attachment and Loss (Late)
John Bowlby · 1969 (vol. I); 1973 (vol. II); 1980 (vol. III)
Envy and Gratitude (Late)
Melanie Klein · 1957
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mid)
Mark Twain · 1876-83 (composed); 1884 (UK); 1885 (US)
Foundation (Mid)
Isaac Asimov · 1942-50 (stories); 1951 (collected as Foundation)
The Fire Next Time (Mid)
James Baldwin · 1962-63
Decolonising the Mind (Late)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o · 1986 (based on 1984 Robb Lectures)
Proof of an External World (Late)
G. E. Moore · 1939 (British Academy lecture)
The Analysis of Sensations (Mid)
Ernst Mach · 1886 (1st ed.); 1903 (rev. 5th ed.)
A New Kind of Science (Mid)
Stephen Wolfram · 1991-2002 (composed over 11 years); 2002 (published)
Modern Moral Philosophy (Mature (the journal paper that reshaped Anglophone moral philosophy))
G. E. M. Anscombe (Elizabeth Anscombe) · 1958 (Philosophy 33, no. 124)
The Fragility of Goodness (Mature (the book that established Nussbaum as a major figure))
Martha Nussbaum · 1986 (Cambridge UP; revised 2001 with substantial new preface)
An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (Late (Wollstonecraft's last completed major non-fiction work, three years before her death))
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1794 (Vol. I only — the projected continuation was never written)
The Undiscovered Self (Late (one of Jung's last short works, written at 82))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1957 (Schweizer Monatshefte; book edition Rascher, Zurich; English trans. R.F.C. Hull, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1958)
De Officiis (Late (Cicero's last completed philosophical work, written in the months before his proscription and execution))
Marcus Tullius Cicero · 44 BC (composed at Tusculum, October-December 44 BC, in the months between Caesar's assassination and Cicero's own death in December 43 BC)
Tusculan Disputations (Late (composed in the year of Cicero's daughter's death, in his most intense period of philosophical writing))
Marcus Tullius Cicero · 45 BC (Tusculanae Disputationes; composed at Tusculum after the death of his daughter Tullia)
De Libero Arbitrio (Late (the treatise that publicly broke the Erasmus-Luther alliance, written after seven years of pressure for Erasmus to declare his position))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1524 (De Libero Arbitrio ΔΙΑΤΡΙΒΗ sive Collatio, Froben, Basel)
Greek New Testament (Novum Instrumentum) (Mature (the work that established Erasmus's international reputation and reshaped biblical scholarship))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1516 (Novum Instrumentum omne, Froben, Basel — first edition); revised 1519, 1522, 1527, 1535
Physica and Causae et Curae (Mid-mature (Hildegard's middle period, between her three major visionary works))
Hildegard of Bingen · c. 1150-58 (Rupertsberg, between Scivias and Liber Vitae Meritorum)
Race Matters (Mature (the book that established West as a major public intellectual))
Cornel West · 1993 (Beacon Press; 25th anniversary edition 2017)
Democracy Matters (Late-mature (the post-9/11 sequel to the 1993 Race Matters))
Cornel West · 2004 (Penguin)
Dictionnaire philosophique (Late (composed during the Ferney years))
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1764 (Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, Geneva; greatly expanded through 1769)
Éléments de la philosophie de Newton (Mid (the work that established Voltaire as a public intellectual of European reach))
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1738 (Éléments de la philosophie de Newton, Amsterdam; revised 1741)
Political Treatise (Late (Spinoza's last work, left incomplete at his death))
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza · 1675-77 (unfinished at Spinoza's 1677 death; published posthumously as part of the Opera Posthuma)
Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (Early (the work that launched Rousseau's career))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1750 (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, Geneva)
Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Last (composed in Rousseau's final two years, after he had retreated from public life))
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1776-78 (unfinished at Rousseau's death; published posthumously 1782)
De Constantia Sapientis (Mid)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 56 CE (early in Seneca's tenure as Nero's advisor)
The Mandarins (Mature)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1954 (Gallimard; Prix Goncourt 1954)
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Mature)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1958 (Gallimard)
Old Age (Late-mature)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1970 (Gallimard)
Pure Lust (Late-mature)
Mary Daly · 1984 (Beacon Press)
Asa Di Var (Mature)
Guru Nānak Dev Ji · c. 1500-1539 (Nānak's mature teaching years; included in the Guru Granth Sahib 1604)
Politics and Conscience (Mature (composed during Havel's dissident period before the 1989 Velvet Revolution))
Václav Havel · 1984 (composed in Czechoslovakia under Communist authority; prepared as the acceptance speech for an honorary degree from the University of Toulouse that Havel could not attend)
Resistance to Civil Government (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (first published as "Resistance to Civil Government" in Aesthetic Papers; reprinted posthumously as "Civil Disobedience" in 1866)
A Plea for Captain John Brown (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1859 (delivered as a public address in Concord, Boston, and Worcester, October-November 1859; published 1860)
Slavery in Massachusetts (Mature)
Henry David Thoreau · 1854 (delivered at the antislavery convention, Framingham, July 4, 1854; published in The Liberator and other papers)
Soliloquies (Early)
Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1800 (Monologen, Berlin)
Some Remarks on Logical Form (Transitional)
Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1929 (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 9)
Eyeless in Gaza (Mid-mature)
Aldous Huxley · 1936
De Vulgari Eloquentia (Mid-mature)
Dante Alighieri · c. 1304-05 (two of four planned books)
The Descent of Man (Mature)
Charles Darwin · 1871 (John Murray, London); revised 1874
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Late)
Charles Darwin · 1872 (John Murray, London)
The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (Last)
Charles Darwin · 1881 (John Murray, London) — Darwin's last book, published months before his April 1882 death
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Mature)
Charles Darwin · 1868 (John Murray, London); revised 1875
Out of My Later Years (Late)
Albert Einstein · 1950 (Philosophical Library, New York)
Italian Journey (Late-mature retrospective)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1816 (parts I-II) and 1829 (part III); recounting 1786-88 journey
Jesus and the Disinherited (Mature)
Howard Thurman · 1949
Giovanni's Room (Mid-mature)
James Baldwin · 1956
A Madman's Diary (Mid-mature)
Lu Xun · 1918
The True Story of Ah Q (Mature)
Lu Xun · 1921-22
The Communist Manifesto (Early)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels · February 1848 (commissioned by the Communist League, London)
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Late)
Leo Tolstoy · Written 1890–93; banned in Russia, published 1894 in Berlin
Experience and Nature (Late)
John Dewey · 1925 (Carus Lectures, Chicago; revised 1929)
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins · 1976 (revised editions 1989, 2006)
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1951 (Philosophical Review)
The Ethics of Ambiguity (Early)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1947
The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Late (post-crisis))
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī · c. 1097-1106 (composed during al-Ghazali's years of withdrawal after the 1095 spiritual crisis)
On Interpretation
Aristotle · c. 350 BC (early in the Organon)
Second Inaugural Address (Late (six weeks before assassination))
Abraham Lincoln · March 4, 1865 (six weeks before his assassination)
Why I Am Not a Christian (Mid-late)
Bertrand Russell · 1927 (lecture); 1957 (collected essays as a book)
The Gay Science (Middle (between Daybreak and Zarathustra))
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1882 (first edition, four books); 1887 (second edition, with added fifth book and preface)
A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Late)
John Wesley · 1766 (with revisions through 1777; published as a unified text in 1777)
Walden (Mid (Thoreau's major prose statement))
Henry David Thoreau · 1854 (drawing on Thoreau's 1845-47 residence at Walden Pond)
Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Late (the mature systematic philosophy))
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1820 (published 1821 with the famous controversial Preface)
The Sovereignty of Good (Mid (her major philosophical statement, alongside Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals 1992))
Iris Murdoch · 1970 (collecting essays from 1956-67)
Émile (Late)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762 (published the same year as the Social Contract; both condemned and burned by authorities)
Zhuangzi
Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou) · c. 4th-3rd c. BC (Inner Chapters by Zhuang Zhou; Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters by later hands)
Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Early (Erasmus's first major work))
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1503 (with a famous expanded 1518 preface that became a humanist-Reformation manifesto)
The Stranger (Early (the breakthrough novel))
Albert Camus · 1942 (alongside The Myth of Sisyphus; published in occupied Paris)
Ideas and Opinions (Late (the most comprehensive single-volume collection))
Albert Einstein · 1954 (collected from earlier essays and addresses)
The Concept of Nature (Early-mid (preceding Science and the Modern World, 1925))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1920 (the Tarner Lectures, Trinity College Cambridge)
Strength to Love (Mid (the major collection of sermons))
Martin Luther King Jr. · 1963 (collected sermons; some preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church Montgomery in the 1950s)
Love and Responsibility (Early (his major pre-papal work; drawn from pastoral and academic teaching))
Karol Józef Wojtyła / Pope John Paul II · 1960 (the first major theological-philosophical book of the future John Paul II; based on his pastoral and academic teaching)
The Acting Person (Mid (his major academic-philosophical work, before his 1978 papal election))
Karol Józef Wojtyła / Pope John Paul II · 1969 (the philosophical magnum opus of his pre-papal academic career)
Mishneh Torah (Mid (the major legal work, between the early Commentary on the Mishnah and the late Guide of the Perplexed))
Moses Maimonides (Rambam) · c. 1170-80 (the second of Maimonides's three major works; preceding the Guide of the Perplexed of c. 1190)
A Black Theology of Liberation (Early (the systematic founding text of the field))
James Cone · 1970 (the second of Cone's books and the systematic statement of the position announced in Black Theology and Black Power, 1969)
The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Late (Cone's major late book))
James Cone · 2011
No Exit (Mid (alongside Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1944 (first performed at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in May 1944)
The Idiot (Mid (after Crime and Punishment, before Demons and Karamazov))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1868-69 (serialised in The Russian Messenger)
Demons (Mid-late (the third of the four great novels))
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky · 1871-72 (based partly on the 1869 Nechayev affair)
On Christian Doctrine (Mid-late (composed across three decades))
Augustine of Hippo · 397 (Books 1-3.25); 426-27 (Books 3.25-4, completed near the end of Augustine's life)
The Imaginary (Early (preceding Being and Nothingness))
Jean-Paul Sartre · 1940
De Providentia (Late)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca · c. 64 AD (late in Seneca's life, shortly before his forced suicide)
Prior and Posterior Analytics
Aristotle · c. 350 BC (the core logical works of the Organon)
Hamlet (Mid (mature middle period))
William Shakespeare · c. 1600-01
Confessions of a Mask (Early (the breakthrough novel that established Mishima's literary reputation))
Yukio Mishima · 1949 (Mishima's breakthrough novel, written at age 24)
Essays in Zen Buddhism (Mid (Suzuki's major early period of Western dissemination))
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1927 (First Series), 1933 (Second), 1934 (Third) — published in English by Rider & Co. London
Structural Anthropology (Mid (the methodological consolidation))
Claude Lévi-Strauss · 1958
Ninety-Five Theses (Early (the founding act of the Reformation))
Martin Luther · October 31, 1517 (posted to the door of All Saints' Church, Wittenberg)
The Freedom of a Christian (Early (1520 is Luther's most productive year of foundational treatises))
Martin Luther · 1520 (published in both Latin and German; the third of the three great 1520 Reformation treatises)
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Early (1520, foundational year))
Martin Luther · 1520
The Waste Land (Mid (the canonical modernist poem))
Thomas Stearns Eliot · 1921 (during Eliot's nervous breakdown and convalescence in Switzerland); 1922 published (edited substantially by Ezra Pound)
Convivio (Mid (early years of exile, preceding the Comedy))
Dante Alighieri · 1304-07 (composed during the early years of Dante's exile from Florence; unfinished — four of fifteen planned books completed)
The Sorrows of Young Werther (Early (the 25-year-old Goethe's breakthrough work))
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1774
Staying with the Trouble (Late)
Donna Haraway · 2016
The Sea of Fertility (Late (the major late work, completed the day of his 1970 ritual suicide))
Yukio Mishima · 1965-70 (Spring Snow 1965-67, Runaway Horses 1967-68, The Temple of Dawn 1968-70, The Decay of the Angel 1970-71)
Zen and Japanese Culture (Late)
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1959 (developed from his 1938 Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture)
The Reasonableness of Christianity (Late)
John Locke · 1695
Myth, Literature and the African World (Mid)
Wole Soyinka · 1976
Peace with God (Early-mid)
William Franklin "Billy" Graham · 1953
Greek New Testament (Novum Instrumentum) (Mid)
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam · 1516
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Late (the major autobiographical work))
Carl Gustav Jung · 1957-61 (recorded conversations with Aniela Jaffé); published 1962
Runaway Horses (Late)
Yukio Mishima · 1969 (the second of the four Sea of Fertility novels)
Commentary on the Mishnah (Early-mid)
Moses Maimonides (Rambam) · c. 1158-68
Between Facts and Norms (Late)
Jürgen Habermas · 1992 (German; English 1996)
The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Early)
Karl Popper · 1934 (Logik der Forschung); 1959 English
Conjectures and Refutations (Mid)
Karl Popper · 1963
The Logical Syntax of Language (Mid)
Rudolf Carnap · 1934 (German; English 1937)
Aspects of Scientific Explanation (Mid)
Carl G. Hempel · 1965
Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Late)
Jan Patočka · 1975 (Czech samizdat; revised; English 1996)
Philosophy of Existence (Late)
Karl Jaspers · 1938 (German; English 1971)
Naming and Necessity (Mid)
Saul Kripke · 1972 (Princeton lectures); 1980 (book)
Counterfactuals (Early)
David Lewis · 1973
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Mid)
Bernard Williams · 1985
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Early)
P.F. Strawson · 1959
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Mid)
Robert Nozick · 1974
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Early)
Michael J. Sandel · 1982 (2nd edn 1998)
Inquiry on the Great Learning (Daxue Wen) (Late)
Wang Yangming · 1527
Summa Logicae (Late)
William of Ockham · c. 1323
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Late)
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792
The Feminine Mystique (Late)
Betty Friedan · 1963
Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Mid)
Catharine A. MacKinnon · 1989
Frontiers of Justice (Late)
Martha C. Nussbaum · 2006
Justice and the Politics of Difference (Mid)
Iris Marion Young · 1990
On Nature (Fragments) (Early)
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae · c. 460 BCE
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) (Mid)
Titus Lucretius Carus · c. 55 BCE
Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Late)
Diogenes Laertius · c. 3rd century CE
Moralia (Ēthika) (Late)
Plutarch of Chaeronea · c. 100 CE
Adversus Mathematicos (Against the Mathematicians / Professors) (Late)
Sextus Empiricus · c. 180-200 CE
Historical and Critical Dictionary (Dictionnaire Historique et Critique) (Late)
Pierre Bayle · 1697 (2nd expanded edn 1702)
Philosophical Letters (Lettres Philosophiques / Lettres Anglaises) (Mid)
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) · 1734
Utopia (De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia) (Mid)
St. Thomas More · 1516
Matter and Memory (Matière et Mémoire) (Mid)
Henri Bergson · 1896
Creative Evolution (L'évolution créatrice) (Late)
Henri Bergson · 1907
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt) (Early)
Franz Brentano · 1874
A Confession (Ispoved') (Late)
Leo Tolstoy · 1882
The View from Nowhere (Mid)
Thomas Nagel · 1986
Warranted Christian Belief (Late)
Alvin Plantinga · 2000
Reasons and Persons (Mid)
Derek Parfit · 1984
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Late)
John Rawls · 2001
The Philosophy of Philosophy (Late)
Timothy Williamson · 2007
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La condition postmoderne) (Late)
Jean-François Lyotard · 1979
Climate and Culture (Fūdo: ningengakuteki kōsatsu) (Mid)
Watsuji Tetsurō · 1935
Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana) (Mid)
José Carlos Mariátegui · 1928
Toward the African Revolution (Late)
Frantz Fanon · 1952-1961 essays; 1964 (collection)
Silent Spring (Late)
Rachel Carson · 1962
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Late)
James Lovelock · 1979
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Late)
Donna J. Haraway · 2003
Critique of Cynical Reason (Kritik der zynischen Vernunft) (Mid)
Peter Sloterdijk · 1983
Ways of Worldmaking (Late)
Nelson Goodman · 1978
The Claim of Reason (Mid)
Stanley Cavell · 1979
Natural Goodness (Late)
Philippa Foot · 2001
An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Mid)
John Henry Newman · 1845 (rev. 1878)
Orthodoxy (Mid)
G.K. Chesterton · 1908
Mere Christianity (Mid)
C.S. Lewis · 1952 (based on BBC radio talks 1941-44)
Notes on the State of Virginia (Mid)
Thomas Jefferson · 1781-82 (composed); 1785 (Paris edn); 1787 (London edn)
The Age of Reason (Late)
Thomas Paine · 1794 (Part I); 1795 (Part II); 1807 (Part III)
Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Late)
Tu Weiming · 1985
Gaudium et Spes (Late)
Second Vatican Council · 1965 (7 December)
Laudato Si' (Late)
Pope Francis · 2015 (24 May)
The Voice of the Voiceless (Late)
Óscar Romero · 1977-80 (collected pastoral letters)
Church: Charism and Power (Igreja: carisma e poder) (Mid)
Leonardo Boff · 1981
Women, Race & Class (Mid)
Angela Y. Davis · 1981
Black Feminist Thought (Mid)
Patricia Hill Collins · 1990 (2nd edn 2000)
An Essay on Man (Late)
Alexander Pope · 1733-34
Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot) (Mid)
Samuel Beckett · 1948-49 (composed); 1952 (French publication); 1953 (premiere)
Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili) (Mid)
Italo Calvino · 1972
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) (Mid)
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages (Mid)
Alfred Tarski · 1933 (Polish); 1935 (German); 1956 (English)
The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung) (Mid)
Ernst Mach · 1883
Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Mid)
Albert Einstein · 1916 (German); 1920 (English)
Ulysses (Mid)
James Joyce · 1914-21 (composed); 1922 (published)
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) (Mid)
Marcel Proust · 1913
Collected Poems (Late)
Wallace Stevens · 1954 (collection of poems 1923-54)
The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality (Late)
Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama) · 2005
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (Mid)
Chögyam Trungpa · 1973 (compiled from 1970-71 lectures)
Metaphors We Live By (Late)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson · 1980
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Late)
Nick Bostrom · 2014
Halakhic Man (Ish ha-Halakhah) (Mid)
Joseph B. Soloveitchik · 1944
A Brief History of Time (Late)
Stephen Hawking · 1988
Cosmopolitics (Late)
Isabelle Stengers · 2003-11 (French in 7 vols; English in 2 vols)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Late)
Malcolm X with Alex Haley · 1965
The Gulag Archipelago (Late)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1958-68 (composed); 1973-75 (published in Russian abroad)
Confessions (Late)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1769 (composed); 1782-89 (posthumous)
Principia Ethica (Early)
G.E. Moore · 1903
Language, Truth, and Logic (Early)
A.J. Ayer · 1936
On Sense and Reference (Mid)
Gottlob Frege · 1892
The Language of Thought (Mid)
Jerry Fodor · 1975
The Sources of Normativity (Mid)
Christine Korsgaard · 1996 (Tanner Lectures 1992)
Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Late)
J. L. Mackie · 1977
Astronomia Nova (Mid)
Johannes Kepler · 1609
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (Late)
James Clerk Maxwell · 1873 (2 vols.; 2nd ed. 1881; 3rd ed. 1891)
What Is Life? (Late)
Erwin Schrödinger · 1943 (lectures); 1944 (book)
Anna Karenina (Mid)
Leo Tolstoy · 1873-77 (serialized); 1878 (book)
The Essays (Late)
Michel de Montaigne · 1580 (Books I-II); 1588 (Book III); 1595 (posthumous augmented)
A Doll's House (Mid)
Henrik Ibsen · 1879 (first performed Copenhagen)
Things Fall Apart (Mid)
Chinua Achebe · 1958
The Histories (Early)
Herodotus · c. 440s-420s BCE
History and Class Consciousness (Mid)
György Lukács · 1923
The Construction of Reality in the Child (Mid)
Jean Piaget · 1937 (French); 1954 (English)
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Mid)
Noam Chomsky · 1965
Mother Courage and Her Children (Late)
Bertolt Brecht · 1939 (composed in Swedish exile); 1941 (Zurich premiere)
The German Ideology (Early)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels · 1845-46 (composed in Brussels; published 1932 by Soviet Union)
On Photography (Late)
Susan Sontag · 1973-77 (essays in New York Review of Books); 1977 (book)
Ways of Seeing (Late)
John Berger · 1972 (BBC series and book)
Camera Lucida (Late)
Roland Barthes · 1979-80 (Barthes died Mar 1980)
Studies in Iconology (Late)
Erwin Panofsky · 1939
Pride and Prejudice (Mid)
Jane Austen · 1796-97 (drafted as First Impressions); 1813 (published)
Bleak House (Mid)
Charles Dickens · 1852-53 (serialized); 1853 (book)
My Name Is Red (Mid)
Orhan Pamuk · 1998 (Turkish Benim Adım Kırmızı); 2001 (English)
Gravity's Rainbow (Mid)
Thomas Pynchon · 1968-72
Hopscotch (Mid)
Julio Cortázar · 1963 (Spanish Rayuela); 1966 (English)
The Analysis of Mind (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1921
Scientific Thought (Mid)
C. D. Broad · 1923
Past, Present and Future (Late)
Arthur N. Prior · 1967
A Realist Theory of Science (Mid)
Roy Bhaskar · 1975 (1st ed.); 1978 (2nd ed.); 2008 (3rd ed.)
The Possibility of Naturalism (Mid)
Roy Bhaskar · 1979 (1st ed.); 1989 (2nd ed.); 1998 (3rd ed.)
Christ and Culture (Late)
H. Richard Niebuhr · 1951
God-Christ-Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (Late)
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki · 1989 (rev. ed.; orig. 1982)
Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Mid)
John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin · 1976
Civil Disobedience (Mid)
Henry David Thoreau · 1849 (as Resistance to Civil Government in Aesthetic Papers); retitled Civil Disobedience 1866 (posthumous)
Anti-Duhring (Late)
Friedrich Engels · 1877-78
Homo Deus (Late)
Yuval Noah Harari · 2015 (Hebrew); 2016 (English)
The Singularity Is Near (Late)
Ray Kurzweil · 2005
Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? (Mid)
Nick Bostrom · 2003 (Philosophical Quarterly)
Hyperobjects (Late)
Timothy Morton · 2013
The Quadruple Object (Late)
Graham Harman · 2011
Writing the Book of the World (Mid)
Theodore Sider · 2011 (1st ed.); 2014 (paperback)
Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics (Early)
Hugh Everett III · 1957 (Reviews of Modern Physics)
Capital (Late)
Karl Marx · 1867 (vol. I); 1885 (vol. II posthumous); 1894 (vol. III posthumous, edited by Engels)
Realms of the Human Unconscious (Mid)
Stanislav Grof · 1975
Quantum Healing (Mid)
Deepak Chopra · 1989
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind (Late)
Deepak Chopra · 1993
The Power of Now (Late)
Eckhart Tolle · 1997 (Canada); 2004 (revised US)
Letters to the Son of the Wolf (Last (less than a year before his 1892 death))
Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí) · 1891 (composed in 'Akká)
Sidereus Nuncius (Early-mid (the breakthrough that established Galileo's international reputation))
Galileo Galilei · March 1610 (Venice: Tommaso Baglioni)
Short Treatise on God (Early (Spinoza's first systematic presentation of his metaphysics, predating the Ethics))
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza · c. 1660-62 (Dutch manuscript circulated only among Spinoza's closest correspondents during his lifetime; rediscovered 1862)
A Very Easy Death (Late)
Simone de Beauvoir · 1964 (Gallimard)
Orlando (Mature)
Virginia Woolf · 1928 (Hogarth Press)
Essays in Radical Empiricism (Late posthumous)
William James · 1904-08 essays; collected posthumously 1912
Journal of Researches (Early)
Charles Darwin · 1839 (first edition); 1845 (substantially revised second edition)
The World as I See It (Mid-mature)
Albert Einstein · 1934 (German: Mein Weltbild, Querido Verlag, Amsterdam; English: Covici Friede, New York)
Personas with Pragmatic Realism as a declared influence
How Pragmatic Realism resolves each dilemma
56 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 15 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 1 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Do you really choose?
The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it.
69%
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real.
69%
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible.
69%
Is the universe running out of usable energy?
Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing.
47%
Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so?
Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time.
47%
Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide?
Time is unbounded but matter is not; we can owe more across long time than the matter can provide.
47%
How much weight do future people deserve?
Time arises from events or from a deeper substrate — the future is not yet.
31%
Is regret rational?
The past is not a thing now; regret is the present holding what is no longer.
31%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Past species no longer exist; what we owe is to the present and the future.
31%
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What is money?
The question of what money is — a measured store of real value, an agreed-on practice, a relational ledger of debts, or just a name we apply to many different things — sits behind every argument about inflation, cryptocurrency, debt, and the state.
Money is a social practice — its content is what we make it.
On this view, money is exactly what societies do that performs the monetary functions. There is no fact about whether something is 'really' money beyond whether it is used as money. A community that decides shell beads or carbon credits or proof-of-work hashes count as …
Roads not taken
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. (55%) ·
Money is the ledger of obligations among real people. (14%) ·
“Money” names a family of practices — the definition question is nominal. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
What is a nation?
Whether a nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character, a constructed legal-political artifact, a web of kinship and shared history, an imagined community, or a conventional partition of a deeper unity — these are real ontological positions with sharply different political downstream.
A nation is a constructed polity — a project, not a discovery.
On this view, nations are made: by treaties, by wars, by deliberate institution-building, by the slow work of collective practice. There is nothing intrinsic about a national kind; what exists is the practice. What we owe the nation is what we owe any institution we …
Roads not taken
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. (55%) ·
A nation is the web of kinship, ancestry, and shared land that hosts a people. (14%) ·
“Nation” names a family of practices imaginatively held together. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
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.
Gender is constructed; what counts as male or female reflects practice.
On this view, while biological features exist, what they socially mean — what counts as a man or a woman, what roles attach, how the categories are policed and revised — is the work of social practice. The categories are real but constructed; revising them …
Roads not taken
Sex is a real biological kind with given content. (55%) ·
Sex and gender are constituted by relations of recognition. (14%) ·
“Male” and “female” are family-resemblance terms — no single essence. (8%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
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.
The categories we count as 'human' are emergent from practice; germline editing is a practice-revision like any other.
On this view, biological facts about the genome exist, but what we count as 'human nature' is downstream of practice. The germline is one more thing humans now have technical access to; the question is not whether the practice transgresses an essence but whether the …
Roads not taken
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. (55%) ·
Personhood is constituted by relations of descent and kinship; germline editing reshapes the relational fabric. (14%) ·
'Human nature' is a cluster term without a single essence; the editing question is empirical, not metaphysical. (8%)
Distinctive · only 23% of schools agree
(47/208)
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.
Matter is real but emerges from something deeper — neither bedrock nor created-from-nothing.
On this view, matter is genuinely there, but it isn't the floor of reality. It depends on something more fundamental — dependent origination, mind, divine sustaining act, computational substrate, or the structure of conditions — and is conserved only at its own level of description. …
Roads not taken
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. (56%) ·
Matter is constituted by relations; the question of 'from what?' presupposes substance. (16%) ·
Matter arises and dissolves through cosmic rounds; neither created from nothing nor eternal. (4%)
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
Distinctive · only 4% of schools agree
(8/208)
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.
Civic ritual or pragmatic moral function is the authority.
Religion's authority is its public-civic function, not its metaphysical claims.
Roads not taken
The category does not apply — the school is non-religious. (42%) ·
Direct experiential union is the authority. (16%) ·
Institutional teaching tradition is the authority. (13%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(31/208)
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.
Nature is partly what we make of it — concepts, practices, and minds shape the world.
On these views, the 'nature' we live in is not a stand-alone given but something co-constituted by the categories, concepts, technologies, and practices through which we encounter it. There is a world prior to our practices, but what shows up in it as significant, real, …
Roads not taken
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. (50%) ·
Embedded in a web — partners with the more-than-human world. (14%) ·
Subject to a real natural order we did not make. (12%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(31/208)
Should we colonize space?
The drive to extend human presence beyond Earth is sometimes framed as the next chapter of stewardship, sometimes as hubris, sometimes as escape from problems we ought to solve here. Which it is depends on what we take our relationship to nature to be.
The 'space frontier' is partly what we make of it.
On these views, space is not a given canvas on which we paint; it is one more domain that is constituted, in part, by the categories, practices, and imaginations we bring to it. What 'colonisation' even means is a function of frames we choose. The …
Roads not taken
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. (50%) ·
Colonisation continues the work that ended the wisdom of seven-generation thinking. (14%) ·
Nature includes its limits; colonisation is bounded by what the cosmos allows. (12%)
Distinctive · only 15% of schools agree
(31/208)
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Editing the genomes of the plants and animals we eat is either the natural continuation of breeding — careful improvement of what is given — or a category error that treats biology as raw material rather than as living kind.
What counts as a 'natural' genome is itself a construction.
On these views, the line between 'natural' and 'modified' organisms is partly drawn by the categories we use. Domesticated wheat, hybridised corn, selectively-bred cattle are all 'modifications' that prior generations called natural. The salient question is not whether to modify but which modifications, by whom, …
Roads not taken
Genetic modification is cultivation by other means. (50%) ·
Editing the genome cuts into the relational fabric; we should be very slow. (14%) ·
Biology is what it is; we modify it within real biological constraints. (12%)
Distinctive · only 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
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?
A person comes into being gradually, as the capacities of a mind develop.
On this view, personhood is not a status conferred at a moment but a property of beings with certain capacities — to feel, to suffer, to prefer, eventually to reflect. A zygote has none of these; a late-term fetus has many; a newborn has most. …
Roads not taken
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. (55%) ·
Personhood is conferred by being-in-relation. (14%) ·
The question presupposes a fact of the matter that isn’t there. (8%)
31 mainstream positions
What is marriage?
Marriage is a practice we shape — its content is what we make it.
16%
Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed?
Truth is real but always known from a perspective.
16%
Does history have a direction or meaning?
History is the gradual unfolding of improvement or liberation.
23%
Could causation work backwards?
Causation runs one way — the arrow of time is real and structural.
68%
Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us?
The asymmetry is real because time itself has a real direction.
68%
Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it?
The arrow is real and structural; the asymmetry isn't an artifact of description.
68%
Is environmental damage ever truly permanent?
Damage is real and permanent on the relevant timescales. There is no recovery; there is only limitation.
66%
Can a civilization recover from collapse?
Civilizational complexity is hard to build and easy to lose; recovery is at best partial.
66%
Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally?
Entropy is what time is. The moral weight, if any, is the weight of working against the current.
66%
Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally?
Moral obligation tracks the relations one is in; distance does matter, structurally.
50%
Can prayer for someone far away affect them?
Prayer changes the pray-er, not the prayed-for.
47%
Are coincidences ever more than coincidence?
Coincidence is exactly what the math says it is. The pattern is in the noticer.
47%
Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom?
The observer is in time; foreknowledge across times raises real freedom problems.
46%
Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless?
Meditators are bounded observers reporting unusual brain states; the 'timeless' is metaphorical.
46%
Does prayer change God's mind?
If there is an addressee at all, it is in time; prayer is communication, and may genuinely change what comes next.
46%
Are the dead morally present to the living?
Observers are bounded by their own moment, and no further agency makes the dead present.
43%
What makes someone the same person over time?
You are your body — continuity is bodily continuity.
36%
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Same body, same person — even when the cognitive pattern has changed.
36%
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived?
Different body, different person — you died in the scanner.
36%
Is reality fundamentally digital?
No — continuous fields, classical limits, analog deep structure.
36%
Are there indivisible units of experience?
No — continuous Jamesian stream, phenomenological lived time.
36%
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Reconstructed — continuous re-narrating, no fixed engrams.
36%
Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans?
Animal minds are real because biology is the substrate of mind.
31%
Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious?
Brain tissue can in principle do what brains do; the question is integration.
31%
What happens to "you" when you die?
Death is genuinely the end.
29%
Could an AI have a mind that matters?
No — mind is what a biological brain does, and an LLM has no brain.
29%
Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species?
The community of persons is the moral primary.
28%
Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it?
Trust the practice, not the practitioner.
13%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
'Revelation' is a category communities construct for what counts as authoritative.
13%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
Whether an LLM 'knows' is the constructive question the practice has to answer.
13%
How is knowledge of reality produced?
Through practical engagement; what works counts as known.
9%
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone.
50%
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys.
50%
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible.
50%
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away.
50%
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