School #4
Pragmatism
James, Dewey, Peirce
Pragmatism holds that the meaning and truth of any idea lie in its practical consequences. Charles Sanders Peirce's 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878) founded the movement by proposing that a concept's content is exhausted by the experiential effects it predicts. William James's 'Pragmatism' (1907) popularized this into a theory of truth itself: a belief is true insofar as it proves useful, workable, and fruitful in guiding action. John Dewey's 'Experience and Nature' (1925) extended pragmatism into a comprehensive naturalism, arguing that inquiry is not a spectator's contemplation of fixed reality but an organism's active reconstruction of problematic situations — making knowing a form of doing, and truth a property that emerges from the ongoing process of intelligent engagement with the world.
Worldview
The pragmatist inhabits a world defined not by what things "really are" in some abstract metaphysical sense but by what difference things make. Truth is not a static correspondence between thought and reality but a living property of ideas that prove themselves in practice — an idea is true insofar as it works, guides action successfully, and opens new avenues of inquiry. This orientation produces a characteristic intellectual temperament: anti-dogmatic, experimentally minded, and deeply attentive to consequences. The pragmatist feels most at home in the thick of practical engagement — solving problems, testing hypotheses, adjusting beliefs in light of results — rather than in armchair speculation about the ultimate nature of being. The framework classifies this as None: metaphysical agency runs through natural and social causation; there is no personal deity or cosmic ordering principle behind the inquiry process. The framework reads this as Constructed moral authority: what counts as warranted assertion is constituted by communities of inquiry under fallibilist self-correction; nothing is normatively final outside the practice that does the warranting.
Moral Implications
Pragmatist ethics rejects fixed moral absolutes in favor of a melioristic experimentalism: moral principles are hypotheses to be tested by their consequences for human flourishing. Dewey argued that ethical inquiry is continuous with scientific inquiry — we evaluate moral claims by examining whether they produce growth, democratic participation, and the enrichment of shared experience. This makes the pragmatist deeply attentive to the actual effects of moral rules on real communities, and skeptical of any ethic that prioritizes abstract consistency over lived outcomes. Responsibility is communal: because inquiry is a social practice, moral progress requires collaborative deliberation rather than individual moral heroism.
Practical Implications
Pragmatism has directly shaped American education, law, and public policy through its emphasis on experimentation, democratic participation, and the primacy of consequences. Dewey's influence on progressive education treated learning as active problem-solving rather than passive absorption of fixed truths. In technology and science, the pragmatist asks not "is this theory ultimately true?" but "does it work, and for whom?" — making pragmatism naturally allied with evidence-based policy, iterative design, and inclusive stakeholder engagement. Environmentally, the pragmatist evaluates ecological practices by their actual consequences for communities and ecosystems rather than by appeal to intrinsic natural rights.
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I. Time
Time is emergent and practically oriented — it matters insofar as it structures human action and inquiry. The pragmatist treats temporal concepts as tools for organizing experience rather than metaphysical absolutes. Time is continuous, linear, and uni-directional because that is how it functions in human practice. Its extent is infinite in the sense that inquiry and practical engagement are open-ended processes with no final stopping point.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Grain: Continuous
Freedom: Non-Deterministic
Traversability: Linear
Dimensionality: One
Direction: Uni-directional
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II. Space
Space is emergent and finite in practical terms — the pragmatist treats spatial concepts as functional tools for navigating the environment rather than as descriptions of a mind-independent container. Space is flat, local, and three-dimensional because these properties serve the practical needs of human activity. What matters about space is how it shapes what we can do.
Attributes
Extent: Infinite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Curvature: Flat
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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III. Matter
Matter is emergent and finite — it is what we interact with in practical experience. The pragmatist is less interested in matter's ultimate ontological status than in its functional role: matter is whatever resists and responds to human action. It is conserved and local because that is how matter behaves in the domain of practical consequence.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dimensionality: Three
Locality: Local
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IV. Observer
The observer is an embodied, practical creature anchored in the here and now — one person, in one place, at one time. Knowledge begins with direct experience and what works, not with abstract certainties. Total knowledge is neither the goal nor achievable; what matters is whether an idea makes a real difference in practice. Yet experience accumulates: knowledge builds cumulatively over time into a growing toolkit for future action. The observer is active — inquiry is a doing, not a receiving — and multiple observers share a common world of practical consequences, each contributing to an ongoing, communal process of discovery.
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: Experience
Theological Method: Pragmatic-civic
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V. Energy
Energy is emergent and finite — it is understood through its practical effects and consequences rather than as an abstract substance. Conservation holds as a functional regularity that serves inquiry. Dispersibility is irreversible in practice, grounding the pragmatist's attention to real constraints on action.
Attributes
Extent: Finite
Ontological Status: Substantival
Conservation: Conserved
Dispersibility: Irreversible
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VI. Information
Information is defined by its functional relations and practical consequences — a piece of information is whatever makes a difference to inquiry and action. Pragmatism treats information as relational and conserved in the sense that successful inquiry accumulates and builds on prior information. The framework distinguishes scales: information is conserved at the cosmic scale because successful inquiry accumulates a public, transgenerational record, but non-conserved at the personal-identity scale — the individual inquirer dies and only what enters shared practice persists.
Attributes
Ontological Status: Substantival
Cosmic Conservation: Conserved
Personal Conservation: Non-conserved
Granularity: Continuous
Experiments This School Responds To (52)
The Chinese Room
Both the systems reply and Searle ask the wrong question. "Understanding" is a practical capacity — embedded in a life, a community, and consequences. The …
The Ship of Theseus
Which one *is* the ship depends on what we want to do with the answer (insurance, museum exhibit, commemoration). Identity claims are tools, not discoveries; …
Newcomb's Problem
The right policy is the one that, if generally adopted, yields the best outcomes — and one-boxers reliably leave with the million. Functional decision theory …
Twin Earth
Meaning is use, situated in practice. Earth and Twin Earth practices are distinct because they hook onto different substances; the disagreement with internalism is real …
The Experience Machine
The intuition is partly about what we *would* value and partly about loss aversion; once normalised to second-generation users born inside the machine, much of …
The Trolley Problem
Both pure consequentialism and pure deontology mishandle the case; the right approach is contextual judgment informed by the social practices that shape our reactions. The …
The Stern–Gerlach Experiment
The experiment teaches us how to do quantum experiments — pragmatically, that is what spin *is*: a thing measurable in this way, with these statistics. …
Buridan's Ass
Practical rationality includes the disposition to pick *something* rather than nothing in tie cases; a tiebreaker is not a defect of rationality but part of …
Swampman
Whether Swampman "has content" depends on how the community treats him — whether his utterances earn a place in the linguistic practice. The metaphysical question …
The Beetle in the Box
A natural fit: meaning is use, situated in a public practice. The beetle case is one of the clearest statements of why private ostension cannot …
Gettier Cases
Pragmatist epistemology denies the project: "knowledge" is a fluid, context-relative honorific. Gettier cases show only that a particular philosophical definition cannot do all the work, …
The Sorites Paradox
The paradox demands a sharp answer to a question whose practical use does not need one. Where precision is required (legal age, voting threshold), we …
The Sleeping Beauty Problem
The "right" answer is the one with the best betting behaviour for the question at hand. Halfer and thirder are answering different questions; the apparent …
The Veil of Ignorance
A useful heuristic for surfacing partiality, but principles of justice must ultimately be answerable to actual democratic experimentation, not to idealised hypothetical choice (Dewey, Rorty).
The Violinist
A useful thought experiment for surfacing inarticulated commitments; the practical application requires institutional and contextual reasoning the analogy alone cannot supply.
The Drowning Child
The argument oversimplifies the moral psychology of obligation; sustainable ethics emerges from communities and institutions, not from unbounded universal demands.
The Repugnant Conclusion
The case exposes the inadequacy of pure aggregation for guiding actual policy; practical ethics requires context-sensitive judgement and democratic deliberation, not a single welfare metric.
The Ring of Gyges
The genuine question is whether a society of ring-bearers is sustainable; the answer is plainly no, which grounds justice in its functional necessity for shared …
Pascal's Wager
James' "Will to Believe" preserves a pragmatic version: in cases of forced live options where evidence is balanced, one may legitimately let one's passional nature …
The Liar Paradox
Truth is a property of useful belief; the paradox arises only when truth is conceived as a substantial property abstracted from use. In a deflationary …
Milgram's Obedience Experiments
Confirms a pragmatist insight: moral capacity is sustained by institutional and communicative practices. Where those practices are subverted (lab coats, scripts), behaviour shifts dramatically.
Asch's Conformity Experiments
Confirms the pragmatist commitment to inquiry as essentially social: belief formation is normally collective, and the rare ability to maintain individual judgement against consensus is …
The Doomsday Argument
The argument's practical purchase is in motivating attention to existential risk; the specific probability claims are far less robust than the imperative to take long-tail …
The Lottery Paradox
Belief is action-guiding; the paradox arises only when belief is divorced from contexts of action. In any actual decision, the conjunction "no ticket wins" plays …
The Two Envelopes Paradox
In any actual application, the prior distribution is constrained by context; the paradox arises from a context-free idealisation.
The Surprise Examination Paradox
In practice the students are surprised by the exam regardless of their armchair reasoning. The case shows the limits of pure deduction in epistemic contexts …
Hesperus and Phosphorus
The Frege puzzle reflects the situatedness of meaning in practices of inquiry: "Hesperus = Phosphorus" is informative because the practices that anchor the two names …
Quine's Gavagai
A vindication of semantic holism and use-theory: meanings are not discrete entities but flow from total practice; alternative manuals reflect alternative coherent practices.
Hempel's Ravens
The intuition that white shoes do not confirm reflects the lack of *practical* relevance; in actual scientific contexts the relevant evidence is targeted, not symmetric.
Goodman's Grue
Goodman's own resolution — entrenchment — is pragmatist: projectibility tracks which predicates have proved useful in past inductions, not a metaphysical fact about properties.
Russell's Five-Minute Hypothesis
The past is whatever our best methods of inquiry attribute to it; H5 is a degenerate posit that loses to old-universe cosmology on simplicity and …
Block's Blockhead
Mind is what does cognitive work in life; Blockhead's scale (impossibly large lookup) makes it irrelevant to actual cognitive practice. The intuition gap reflects practical …
Wittgenstein's Lion
A natural fit: meaning is use, and use is embedded in practice. Cross-form-of-life translation faces principled limits.
Strawson's Reactive Attitudes
A pragmatist landmark: moral concepts are answerable to the practices that sustain them, not to metaphysical first principles. The reactive attitudes are the bedrock.
The Cogito
The Cogito is a pseudo-foundation: meaningful inquiry begins in shared practice, not in solipsistic self-assurance. The whole reconstructive project starts in the wrong place.
Nozick's Tale of the Slave
The slavery / legitimate-authority distinction is not a sharp line but tracks features of practice: voice, exit, consent, fairness of process. Nozick's puzzle is a …
Singer's Expanding Circle
Moral progress is messier than a single-circle expansion narrative; what looks like progress in one dimension may be regress in another. The metaphor is suggestive …
The Faraday Cage
Faraday's personal entry into the cage was, in part, a demonstration of practical confidence in the theory — exemplifying the pragmatist link between knowledge and …
Kripke's "Plus" vs "Quus"
Meaning is constituted by participation in linguistic practice; Kripke's skeptical solution is essentially pragmatist.
The Survival Lottery
The institutional consequences (terror of citizens, breakdown of trust in medicine) decisively outweigh the lives saved. Practical wisdom rejects the lottery.
BonJour's Clairvoyant
Knowledge is socially situated; Norman's isolation from any community-validated belief-forming practice is what makes his clairvoyance epistemically problematic.
The Frame Problem
A canonical illustration of the situated, embedded character of cognition. Disembodied formal symbol-manipulation cannot solve the frame problem; intelligence is constitutively contextual.
Pascal's Mugging
Reasonable agents discount extreme-tail scenarios for non-decision-theoretic reasons: such reasoning is exploitable, undermines institutions, and is not how intelligent agents actually decide.
Curry's Paradox
Truth-talk is for useful inquiry; Curry shows that pretending we have a complete, unrestricted truth predicate is a mistake — practical truth is local and …
Anscombe's Intention
Action under a description tracks how agents and observers actually engage with intentional behaviour in social practice.
Davidson's Triangulation
A natural ally: meaning and knowledge are constituted by social practice. Davidson's triangulation is a precise version of long-standing pragmatist insights.
Voyager 1 Crossing the Heliopause
The Voyagers exemplify the pragmatic-engineering character of much of modern empirical science: long-lived instruments, accumulated data, decades-long programs.
Archimedes' Eureka — The Displacement Principle
A working test that answers a real question (is the crown pure?) without destroying the object. Knowledge is instrumental; Archimedes' method is pragmatism avant la …
Archimedes' Lever Demonstrations
A spectacular practical demonstration: one man moves a ship. The lever principle is knowledge that does work in the most literal sense.
Hero's Aeolipile
A working device that demonstrates a principle — knowledge embodied in engineering. That it remained unexploited shows that practical uptake depends on social context, not …
Zhang Heng's Seismoscope
Knowledge as early warning: the seismoscope's value is practical (disaster response). It produces actionable information before any human messenger can arrive.
Shen Kuo's Compass Declination
The observation has immediate navigational significance: mariners who ignore declination will miscalculate their course. Knowledge is validated by its practical consequences.
Films Reading Through This School (7)
Memento
Leonard's system of tattoos and notes is a pragmatist reconstruction of memory: external scaffolding that enables purposive action. The film tests whether pragmatism's "belief as …
My Dinner with Andre
Wally's position is straight Deweyan pragmatism: a way of life is vindicated by the work it does, and the test is liveability, not intensity. He …
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The film's final answer — Joel and Clementine agree to try again, knowing how badly it will go — is pragmatist: meaning emerges in commitment …
12 Angry Men
The deliberation is pragmatist in operation: beliefs are tested by the consequences they have for action, and the action here is the decision to convict. …
Wittgenstein
The later Wittgenstein — language-games, forms of life, meaning as use — is read in the film as a pragmatist conversion: the question is no …
Hacksaw Ridge
Doss's vocation as combat medic is pragmatist in operation: his belief (life is sacred and one must not kill) is tested by the actions it …
I ❤ Huckabees
The film treats metaphysics pragmatically: both the Jaffes' and Vauban's positions are tested by what they enable their clients to do, and each works for …
Debates Where This School Is Allied (28)
The Augustine–Pelagius Controversy
British monk; moral capacity of fallen humanity
The Newton–Hooke Disputes
Experimental philosopher; Royal Society curator
Carnap–Quine on Analyticity
Naturalised epistemologist
Sartre vs Camus on Revolution
Existentialist humanist; absurdist
Habermas–Gadamer on Hermeneutics and Critique
Critical theorist; theorist of communicative reason
Kant and Hume
Skeptical empiricist
Plato vs Protagoras
Sophist; relativist
Mencius vs Xunzi on Human Nature
Confucian theorist of cultivated goodness
Śaṅkara vs Maṇḍana Miśra
Mīmāṃsaka; bhedābheda Vedāntin
Wittgenstein vs Russell
Later Wittgenstein; ordinary-language philosopher
The Positivismusstreit
Critical rationalist
Mill vs Whewell on Induction
Empiricist philosopher of science
Putnam vs Rorty on Truth
Pragmatist-realist
Putnam vs Rorty on Truth
Neo-pragmatist; post-philosophical
The Wittgenstein–Popper Poker
Therapeutic philosopher
The Wittgenstein–Popper Poker
Critical rationalist
The Hume–Rousseau Affair
Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and historian
The Hume–Rousseau Affair
Genevan philosopher; proto-Romantic
Confucianism vs Mohism
Gradated benevolence; ritual cultivation
Confucianism vs Mohism
Founder of Mohism; impartialist
James vs Russell on Pragmatism
Founder of American pragmatism
Kuhn vs Popper on Scientific Change
Historian-philosopher of science
Kuhn vs Popper on Scientific Change
Critical rationalist
Lewis vs Stalnaker on Counterfactuals
Modal logician; pragmatist philosopher of language
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Christian anarchist-moralist novelist
Wollstonecraft vs Rousseau on Women
Enlightenment philosopher; pioneering feminist
Wollstonecraft vs Rousseau on Women
Enlightenment philosopher of education and politics
Epicurus vs the Stoics
Atomist hedonist
Works that name Pragmatism in their embodiments
Foundational texts that draw on this school, with each work's declared weight.
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How to Make Our Ideas Clear
Charles Sanders Peirce · 1878 (Popular Science Monthly, January)
Experience and Nature (Late)
John Dewey · 1925 (Carus Lectures, Chicago; revised 1929)
Pragmatism (Late)
William James · 1907 (from 1906 Lowell Lectures, Boston)
The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James · 1901–02 (Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh); 1902 (book form)
The Fixation of Belief (Early)
Charles Sanders Peirce · 1877 (Popular Science Monthly, November)
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Mid (the breakthrough book))
Richard Rorty · 1979
The American Evasion of Philosophy (Mature (West's major work of intellectual history, written before the Race Matters celebrity))
Cornel West · 1989 (Wisconsin UP)
Utilitarianism
John Stuart Mill · 1861 (Fraser's Magazine); 1863 (book form)
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)
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)
Mind, Self, and Society (Late)
George Herbert Mead · 1934 (posthumous; lectures 1928-30)
Consequences of Pragmatism (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1982
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1991
Philosophical Investigations (Late)
Ludwig Wittgenstein · c. 1929–49 (drafted across two decades); 1953 (posthumous publication, ed. Anscombe & Rhees)
On Certainty (Latest)
Ludwig Wittgenstein · Written 1949–51 (in Wittgenstein's final eighteen months); published posthumously 1969
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)
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Mid)
Richard Rorty · 1989
Achieving Our Country (Late)
Richard Rorty · 1998
A Pluralistic Universe (Late)
William James · 1909 (Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, May 1908)
Essays in Radical Empiricism (Late posthumous)
William James · 1904-08 essays; collected posthumously 1912
Words and Life (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 1994
The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 1999
Poor Richard's Almanack (Mid)
Benjamin Franklin · 1732-1758 (annual, twenty-six issues)
The Vantage Point
Lyndon Baines Johnson · 1971
A Time to Heal
Gerald R. Ford · 1979
Context (Late)
Robert Stalnaker · 2014
From a Logical Point of View (Mid-career)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1953 (essays 1939-1952)
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill · 1859
Theory of Communicative Action
Jürgen Habermas · 1981 (German, 2 vols)
Reason, Truth and History (Mid (the major mid-career book, the systematic statement of internal realism))
Hilary Putnam · 1981
Making It Explicit (Mid)
Robert Brandom · 1994
Twenty Years at Hull-House (Late)
Jane Addams · 1910
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Mid)
Erving Goffman · 1959
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)
Essays: Second Series (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1844 (James Munroe & Co., Boston)
Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 2008
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Late)
Bruno Latour · 2013 (French), 2013 (English)
You Learn by Living (Late)
Eleanor Roosevelt · 1960
Autobiography (Late)
Benjamin Franklin · 1771 (Part 1), 1784 (Part 2), 1788 (Part 3), 1790 (Part 4, unfinished)
Memorabilia
Xenophon · c. 370–360 BCE
Inquiry (Mid-career)
Robert Stalnaker · 1984
Context and Content (Mid-to-late)
Robert Stalnaker · 1999
Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Mid-to-late)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1969
Pursuit of Truth (Late)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1990 (revised 1992)
Expression and Meaning (Mid-career)
John Searle · 1979
Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology (Late)
Rudolf Carnap · 1950
Pensées
Blaise Pascal · c. 1657–62 (Pascal d. 1662); first published 1670
Theses on Feuerbach (Early)
Karl Marx · 1845 (notebook fragments, published posthumously by Engels in 1888 with slight editorial changes)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1962 (1st ed.); 1970 (2nd ed. with postscript); 1996 (3rd ed.)
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1951 (Philosophical Review)
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Early (the breakthrough work))
Jürgen Habermas · 1962 (habilitation thesis; English translation 1989)
Representation and Reality (Mid)
Hilary Putnam · 1988
Between Facts and Norms (Late)
Jürgen Habermas · 1992 (German; English 1996)
The Philosophy of Loyalty (Late)
Josiah Royce · 1908
The Uses of Argument (Early)
Stephen Toulmin · 1958
An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no Kenkyū) (Early)
Nishida Kitarō · 1911
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Mid)
Wilfrid Sellars · 1956
Ways of Worldmaking (Late)
Nelson Goodman · 1978
The Many Faces of Realism (Mid)
Hilary Putnam · 1987
The World and the Individual (Mid)
Josiah Royce · 1899-1901 (Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen)
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Late)
Robert D. Putnam · 2000
How to Do Things with Words (Late)
J.L. Austin · 1955 (William James Lectures at Harvard); 1962 (book, posthumous)
Development as Freedom (Late)
Amartya Sen · 1999
The Struggle for Recognition (Mid)
Axel Honneth · 1992 (German); 1995 (English)
Realism with a Human Face (Late)
Hilary Putnam · 1990
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Mature (Lanier's short polemical follow-up to Who Owns the Future?, 2013, and Dawn of the New Everything, 2017))
Jaron Lanier · 2018
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Mature (Kripke's second major book after Naming and Necessity, 1980))
Saul Kripke · 1982 (Harvard UP; based on 1976 Wolfson College lecture, 1977 Princeton seminars)
Convention: A Philosophical Study (Early (Lewis's first book, published at 28, the year he began at UCLA))
David Lewis · 1969 (Harvard UP; based on his 1967 Harvard PhD dissertation under W. V. O. Quine)
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Late (Douglass's third autobiography, covering his post-1855 political career))
Frederick Douglass · 1881 (Park Publishing, Hartford); expanded edition 1892 (De Wolfe, Fiske, Boston)
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)
Essays: First Series (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (James Munroe & Co., Boston)
Laboratory Life (Early)
Bruno Latour · 1979
Science in Action (Mid)
Bruno Latour · 1987
Experiments and Observations on Electricity (Mid)
Benjamin Franklin · 1747-1750 (letters), 1751 (first edition)
The Demon-Haunted World (Late)
Carl Sagan · 1995
De Motu (Mid)
George Berkeley · 1721
The Audacity of Hope (Mid)
Barack H. Obama · 2006
A Promised Land (Late)
Barack H. Obama · 2020
Antidosis
Isocrates · 354 BCE
Fragments and Testimonia
Protagoras of Abdera · c. 5th century BCE (fragments preserved in Plato, Sextus Empiricus, Diogenes Laertius)
Instructions for Practical Living
Wang Yangming (Wang Shouren) · c. 1518 (compiled by students; expanded editions to 1572)
Ways a World Might Be (Late-middle)
Robert Stalnaker · 2003
The Roots of Reference (Late)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1974
Knowledge and Error (Late)
Ernst Mach · 1905
Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Late)
Niels Bohr · 1958
A Theory of Conditionals (Early)
Robert Stalnaker · 1968
Our Knowledge of the Internal World (Late)
Robert Stalnaker · 2008
Limited Inc (Middle-late)
Jacques Derrida · 1977 (with later 'Afterword', 1988)
Black Prophetic Fire (Late)
Cornel West · 2014
Prophesy Deliverance! (Early)
Cornel West · 1982
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin · 1859 (first edition); five subsequent revised editions in Darwin's lifetime
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Karl R. Popper · Composed 1938–1943 in New Zealand exile; published 1945 (2 vols)
Political Liberalism (Late)
John Rawls · 1993 (revised 1996, with new introduction)
The Subjection of Women (Late)
John Stuart Mill · Written 1860–61 with Harriet Taylor Mill's collaboration; published 1869
Adventures of Ideas (Late (Whitehead's last major book))
Alfred North Whitehead · 1933
On Revolution (Late (after Eichmann in Jerusalem))
Hannah Arendt · 1963
The Copernican Revolution (Early (Kuhn's first book))
Thomas Kuhn · 1957
First Inaugural Address (Mid (the inauguration after twelve years of Republican presidency))
William J. Clinton · January 20, 1993
An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Mid-late)
David Hume · 1751
My Life (Late)
William J. Clinton · 2004
Trump: The Art of the Deal (Early)
Donald J. Trump · 1987
Word and Object (Mid)
W.V.O. Quine · 1960
Eclipse of Reason (Mid)
Max Horkheimer · 1947 (English original; German edition 1967)
Knowledge and Human Interests (Early)
Jürgen Habermas · 1968 (German; English 1971)
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Mid)
Jürgen Habermas · 1985 (German; English 1987)
Essays on Actions and Events (Mid)
Donald Davidson · 1980 (essays 1963-78)
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Mid)
Donald Davidson · 1984 (essays 1965-83)
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Mid)
Bernard Williams · 1985
Truth and Other Enigmas (Mid)
Michael Dummett · 1978 (essays 1954-77)
Inquiry on the Great Learning (Daxue Wen) (Late)
Wang Yangming · 1527
Consciousness Explained (Mid)
Daniel C. Dennett · 1991
Speech Acts (Early)
John R. Searle · 1969
Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Late)
Bruno Latour · 2005
The Claim of Reason (Mid)
Stanley Cavell · 1979
The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Late)
Muhammad Iqbal · 1930-34
Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (Late)
Tu Weiming · 1985
The Essential Tension (Late)
Thomas S. Kuhn · 1977
Collected Poems (Late)
Wallace Stevens · 1954 (collection of poems 1923-54)
The Sociological Imagination (Mid)
C. Wright Mills · 1959
The Social Construction of Reality (Mid)
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann · 1966
The Blue and Brown Books (Mid)
Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1933-35 (dictations); 1958 (published posthumously)
Descartes' Error (Late)
António Damásio · 1994
The Interpretation of Cultures (Late)
Clifford Geertz · 1973
The Logic of Practice (Late)
Pierre Bourdieu · 1980 (French); 1990 (English)
Thought and Language (Mid)
Lev Vygotsky · 1934 (posthumous, Vygotsky died June 1934)
The Mind of Primitive Man (Late)
Franz Boas · 1911 (1st ed.); 1938 (rev. 2nd ed.)
Motivation and Personality (Mid)
Abraham Maslow · 1954 (1st ed.); 1970 (rev. 2nd ed.)
The Analysis of Mind (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1921
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
Life's Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World (Late (Næss's closing popular statement, written at 86))
Arne Næss · 1998 (Norwegian original Livsfilosofi: Et personlig bidrag om følelser og fornuft, Oslo: Universitetsforlaget); English 2002
Laughter (Early-mature (between Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution))
Henri Bergson · 1900 (Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique, Revue de Paris; book edition 1900; revised many times through 1924)
On Violence (Late (Arendt's most-cited short political essay, written in response to the 1968 student movements))
Hannah Arendt · 1969 (New York Review of Books, Feb 27); 1970 (Harcourt expanded book edition)
Men in Dark Times (Late (collected from essays spanning more than a decade))
Hannah Arendt · 1968 (Harcourt Brace; essays composed 1955-67, several in New Yorker, Merkur, etc.)
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)
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)
My Bondage and My Freedom (Mature (Douglass's second autobiography, written after his break with Garrison and the founding of his own newspaper))
Frederick Douglass · 1855 (Miller, Orton & Mulligan, New York)
Divinity School Address (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1838 (delivered July 15, 1838, at Harvard Divinity School; published as An Address Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, 1838)
Representative Men (Mature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1850 (Phillips, Sampson & Co., Boston; based on lectures delivered 1845-46)
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (Late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1998
Quantum: The Search for Links (Late)
John Archibald Wheeler · 1989
When Species Meet (Late)
Donna Haraway · 2008
Down to Earth (Late)
Bruno Latour · 2017 (French), 2018 (English)
An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (Mid)
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1934 (Japanese-published English ed.); 1949 (Rider ed. with Jung foreword)
Sapiens: A Graphic History (Late)
Yuval Noah Harari · 2020 (vol. 1), 2021 (vol. 2), 2024 (vol. 3); — series ongoing
The Art of Happiness (Late)
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama · 1998
The Journey: How to Live by Faith in an Uncertain World (Late)
William Franklin "Billy" Graham · 2006
Lanquidity (Late)
Sun Ra (Herman Poole Blount) · 1978 (recorded August 17, 1978; released 1978)
Cosmos (Mid)
Carl Sagan · 1980
Pale Blue Dot (Late)
Carl Sagan · 1994
The Blind Watchmaker (Mid)
Richard Dawkins · 1986
The Ancestor's Tale (Late)
Richard Dawkins · 2004 (1st ed.), 2016 (2nd ed. with Yan Wong)
Teaching to Transgress (Mid)
bell hooks · 1994
Self-Made Men (Mid-Late)
Frederick Douglass · 1859-93 (repeatedly delivered)
2004 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address (Early)
Barack H. Obama · 2004 (July 27, 2004)
Academica (Academic Skepticism) (Mature)
Marcus Tullius Cicero · 45 BCE
Pascal-Fermat Correspondence on Probability (Mid)
Blaise Pascal · 1654
The Conquest of Happiness (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1930
Interpretation and Preciseness (Mid)
Arne Næss · 1953
The Field of Zen (Late)
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1969 (posthumous)
Trump: The Art of the Comeback (Mid)
Donald J. Trump · 1997
Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (Mid-career)
Niels Bohr · 1934
Set Theory and Its Logic (Mid-career)
Willard Van Orman Quine · 1963 (revised 1969)
Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? (Mid-career, post-EPR)
Niels Bohr · 1935
Popular Scientific Lectures (Middle)
Ernst Mach · 1895
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus · c. 170–180 AD
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus · 1942 (Paris, under German occupation)
The Analects
Compiled by Confucius's disciples and their disciples · Compiled c. 5th–3rd century BC; core sayings reflect Confucius (551–479 BC)
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
Outlines of Pyrrhonism
Sextus Empiricus · c. 160–210 AD
The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
Hui-neng (638–713), as transmitted by Fa-hai · c. 780 AD (Dunhuang manuscript); refined recensions through 13th century
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft · 1792 (London, six weeks)
Phenomenology of Perception
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · 1945
Novum Organum
Francis Bacon · 1620 (London; intended as Part II of the never-completed Instauratio Magna)
Beyond Good and Evil (Late)
Friedrich Nietzsche · 1886
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)
Essays: First Series (Mid (Emerson at the peak of his powers))
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (twelve essays collected from earlier lectures and journal entries)
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Mid (Arendt's breakthrough book))
Hannah Arendt · 1951 (with later editions adding new prefaces and material through 1968)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Early (the first of Douglass's three autobiographies))
Frederick Douglass · 1845
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 Power of the Powerless (Mid (Havel as principal Charter 77 dissident))
Václav Havel · 1978 (circulated in samizdat in Czechoslovakia)
Six Crises (Mid (pre-presidential, post-1960 defeat))
Richard M. Nixon · 1962 (after Nixon's 1960 presidential defeat to Kennedy)
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Late)
John Locke · 1693
Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (Late)
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1957
Promises to Keep (Mid)
Joseph R. Biden Jr. · 2007
Sophist
Plato · c. 360 BC
Modes of Thought (Late)
Alfred North Whitehead · 1938 (Wellesley & University of Chicago lectures, 1937-38)
A Community of Character (Mid)
Stanley Hauerwas · 1981
The Politics of Jesus (Mid)
John Howard Yoder · 1972 (2nd edn 1994)
Against Method (Mid)
Paul Feyerabend · 1975 (1st edn); 1988 (2nd); 1993 (3rd)
The Logical Syntax of Language (Mid)
Rudolf Carnap · 1934 (German; English 1937)
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Late)
Michael Polanyi · 1958 (Gifford Lectures 1951-52 at Aberdeen)
Patterns of Discovery (Early)
Norwood Russell Hanson · 1958
The Prose of the World (Mid)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty · composed 1950-52; published 1969 (posthumous)
Mind and World (Late)
John McDowell · 1994 (1991 John Locke Lectures at Oxford)
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Early)
Michael J. Sandel · 1982 (2nd edn 1998)
Spheres of Justice (Mid)
Michael Walzer · 1983
The Feminine Mystique (Late)
Betty Friedan · 1963
Frontiers of Justice (Late)
Martha C. Nussbaum · 2006
Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Late)
Charles Hartshorne · 1984
Enchiridion (Handbook) (Late)
Epictetus (compiled by Arrian) · c. 125 CE
Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Late)
Diogenes Laertius · c. 3rd century CE
Didascalicon (On the Study of Reading) (Early)
Hugh of St Victor · c. 1127
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)
Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience) (Early)
Henri Bergson · 1889 (doctoral thesis)
Creative Evolution (L'évolution créatrice) (Late)
Henri Bergson · 1907
Leaves of Grass (Late)
Walt Whitman · 1855 (1st edn); 1881 (definitive); 1892 (deathbed)
The Construction of Social Reality (Late)
John R. Searle · 1995
On Bullshit (Late)
Harry G. Frankfurt · 1986 (Raritan); 2005 (book)
Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Late)
John Rawls · 2001
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La condition postmoderne) (Late)
Jean-François Lyotard · 1979
We Have Never Been Modern (Nous n'avons jamais été modernes) (Mid)
Bruno Latour · 1991
Silent Spring (Late)
Rachel Carson · 1962
A Sand County Almanac (Late)
Aldo Leopold · 1949 (posthumous)
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Mid)
Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1979
The Social Construction of What? (Late)
Ian Hacking · 1999
The Souls of Black Folk (Mid)
W.E.B. Du Bois · 1903
The Education of Henry Adams (Late)
Henry Adams · 1907 (private printing); 1918 (public)
A Theology for the Social Gospel (Late)
Walter Rauschenbusch · 1917
A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (Mid)
Fung Yu-lan (Feng Youlan) · 1948
The Importance of Living (Mid)
Lin Yutang · 1937
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Late)
Shunryu Suzuki (Suzuki-rōshi) · 1970
Don Quixote (El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha) (Late)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1605 (Part I); 1615 (Part II)
A Room of One's Own (Late)
Virginia Woolf · 1929
Middlemarch (Late)
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) · 1871-72
Metaphors We Live By (Late)
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson · 1980
The Culture of Narcissism (Late)
Christopher Lasch · 1979
The Fall of Public Man (Mid)
Richard Sennett · 1977
Full Catastrophe Living (Late)
Jon Kabat-Zinn · 1990 (revised 2013)
Thinking, Fast and Slow (Late)
Daniel Kahneman · 2011
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Late)
Jonathan Haidt · 2012
The Black Swan (Late)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2007
The Methods of Ethics (Late)
Henry Sidgwick · 1874 (1st edn); 1907 (7th, definitive)
The Concept of Mind (Mid)
Gilbert Ryle · 1949
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Late)
Jeremy Bentham · 1780 (privately printed); 1789 (published)
The Division of Labor in Society (Early)
Émile Durkheim · 1893
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Mid)
Max Weber · 1904-05 (essays); 1920 (revised)
Economy and Society (Late)
Max Weber · 1909-20 (drafts); 1922 (posthumous)
The Philosophy of Money (Mid)
Georg Simmel · 1900 (2nd ed. 1907)
Intentionality (Mid)
John Searle · 1983
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Late)
Alan Turing · 1950 (Mind)
A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Mid)
Claude Shannon · 1948 (Bell System Technical Journal)
Prison Notebooks (Late)
Antonio Gramsci · 1929-35 (composed in fascist prison); 1948-51 (posthumous Italian publication)
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Late)
John Maynard Keynes · 1936
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Late)
Joseph Schumpeter · 1942
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)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mid)
Mark Twain · 1876-83 (composed); 1884 (UK); 1885 (US)
Invisible Man (Mid)
Ralph Ellison · 1945-52
Their Eyes Were Watching God (Mid)
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937
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)
Sense and Sensibilia (Late)
J. L. Austin · 1947-58 (lectures); 1962 (posthumous, reconstructed by G. J. Warnock)
The Analysis of Sensations (Mid)
Ernst Mach · 1886 (1st ed.); 1903 (rev. 5th ed.)
The Divine Relativity (Mid)
Charles Hartshorne · 1948 (Yale Terry Lectures 1947)
Nature (Early)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1836
Self-Reliance (Mid)
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841 (in Essays: First Series)
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Late (Bergson's last major book, written after a long convalescence))
Henri Bergson · 1932 (Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, Paris: Alcan; English trans. R. Ashley Audra & Cloudesley Brereton 1935)
The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language (Early-to-middle (Carnap's most polemical statement of the verificationist programme))
Rudolf Carnap · 1932 (Erkenntnis 2; English trans. Arthur Pap, 1959)
On What Matters (Late (Parfit's final, three-decade-in-the-making work — his second after Reasons and Persons, 1984))
Derek Parfit · 2011 (Vols I & II, Oxford UP); 2017 (Vol III, Oxford UP — published months after Parfit's death)
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)
Brave New World Revisited (Late)
Aldous Huxley · 1958
Sula (Mid)
Toni Morrison · 1973
Fīhi mā Fīhi (Discourses) (Late)
Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī · c. 1262-1273 (transcribed during Rumi's last decade)
The Book of Rites (Liji) (Mid)
Anonymous (composed by various early Confucian writers) · Han dynasty compilation (c. 1st c. BCE) of pre-Qin and Han materials
Sun Ra Discography (Late)
Sun Ra (Herman Poole Blount) · c. 1957-1993 (recordings); compiled discography in scholarship 1990s-onward
The Dragons of Eden (Mid)
Carl Sagan · 1977
Quantum Theory (Early)
David Bohm · 1951
An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (Early)
George Berkeley · 1709
Our Knowledge of the External World (Mid)
Bertrand Russell · 1914
Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism (Early)
Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki · 1907
Personas with Pragmatism as a declared influence
40% William J. Clinton
35% Lyndon B. Johnson
35% Richard Rorty
30% Benjamin Franklin
30% Gerald R. Ford
30% Barack H. Obama
30% Donald J. Trump
30% William James
30% Cornel West
25% Richard M. Nixon
25% James Earl Carter Jr.
25% Ronald W. Reagan
25% George H. W. Bush
25% Joseph R. Biden Jr.
25% Adam Smith
25% Jürgen Habermas
25% Eleanor Roosevelt
25% Hilary Putnam
25% Willard Van Orman Quine
25% Mozi
25% Robert Stalnaker
20% Winston Churchill
20% Mohandas K. Gandhi
20% Frederick Douglass
20% Jean-Jacques Rousseau
20% Mary Wollstonecraft
20% Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela
20% John Stuart Mill
20% Peter Singer
20% Robert Hooke
20% Maṇḍana Miśra
20% Karl Popper
20% Xenophon
15% Abraham Lincoln
15% Martin Luther King Jr.
15% George W. Bush
15% Henry David Thoreau
15% Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
15% Reinhold Niebuhr
15% Daniel Kahneman
15% Thomas Kuhn
15% Protagoras of Abdera
15% Wang Yangming
15% Martha Nussbaum
15% Pelagius
15% Xunzi
10% Hannah Arendt
10% Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha)
10% Galileo Galilei
10% Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
10% Octavia E. Butler
10% Audre Lorde
10% Claude Lévi-Strauss
10% Michel Foucault
10% Thomas Hobbes
10% John Wesley
10% Alasdair MacIntyre
10% Carl Sagan
10% Lu Xun
10% Derek Parfit
10% Mencius (Mengzi)
10% John Searle
5% Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
5% William Franklin "Billy" Graham
5% Guru Nānak Dev Ji
5% Bahá'u'lláh (Mírzá Ḥusayn-ʻAlí Núrí)
5% Graham Harman
-10% G. E. M. Anscombe (Elizabeth Anscombe)
How Pragmatism resolves each dilemma
56 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 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%
How much weight do future people deserve?
Future people are as real as you are — and their interests count for as much.
47%
Is regret rational?
The past is as real as the present; regret is a real attitude toward a real thing.
47%
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them?
Extinct species are as real as we are; they have standing.
47%
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%
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is the world created from nothing?
Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance.
56%
Is the physical world fully real?
Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting.
56%
Does matter have intrinsic moral standing?
Matter is morally considerable insofar as it is created or conserved good.
56%
What is money?
Money is a real institution with intrinsic features.
55%
What is a nation?
A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character.
55%
What makes someone male or female?
Sex is a real biological kind with given content.
55%
Should we edit the human germline?
Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given.
55%
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 3 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 16% of schools agree
(33/208)
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?
Truth is real but always known from a perspective.
Multiple perspectives engage in dialogue; truth is partial, plural, but real.
Roads not taken
Truth is mind-independent, universal, accessible in principle to all. (66%) ·
Truth is real but accessible only from within a tradition. (10%) ·
What counts as truth is constituted by language, practice, history, power. (8%)
Distinctive · only 23% of schools agree
(47/208)
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?
History is the gradual unfolding of improvement or liberation.
Time bends, slowly, toward greater understanding, freedom, or fuller realization.
Roads not taken
History is not where the deepest truth lives. (36%) ·
History is oriented toward a decisive consummation. (19%) ·
History recurs in cosmic cycles. (17%)
33 mainstream positions
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%
When does a person begin?
A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence.
55%
What is marriage?
Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make.
55%
What is our place in nature?
Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform.
50%
Should we colonize space?
Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship.
50%
Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination?
Genetic modification is cultivation by other means.
50%
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 expertise only insofar as it coheres with first-person experience.
17%
Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge?
What gets called 'revelation' is real direct experience — not a text.
17%
Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces?
An LLM has no first-person experience, so no knowing in the relevant sense.
17%
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%
Jump to school (208)
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