Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Tusculan Disputations
Virtue alone suffices for the happy life — death is not an evil, pain is bearable, the passions can be governed
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Tusculan Disputations (Late (composed in the year of Cicero's daughter's death, in his most intense period of philosophical writing)) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Partial |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Cosmic-ordering |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Reason |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Tusculan Disputations
The temporal arc of a human life ending in death — Book I asks whether what closes the life-time is to be feared.
Space
Tusculan Disputations
The space of Cicero's grief — the Tusculum villa where the work was composed in the months after Tullia's death.
Matter
Tusculan Disputations
The embodied agent whose body suffers pain (Book II) and whose passions agitate the soul (Books III-IV).
Observer
Tusculan Disputations
The morally serious agent who applies reasoned argument to the conditions of his own life; the Auditor and Magister of the dialogues.
Energy
Tusculan Disputations
The energies of the passions — grief, fear, desire — and the discipline of reason that governs them.
Information
Tusculan Disputations
The catalogue of arguments, exempla, and consolations through which philosophy transforms the agent's emotional relation to the conditions of life.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
Cicero's personal grief over Tullia's death is the unspoken occasion of the work — Book III on grief is autobiographically loaded — and some readers have found a gap between the philosophical confidence of the argument and the actual condition of the writer. The dialectical-Academic method, which refuses to settle on a single school's position, has been read both as philosophical sophistication (Schofield, Powell) and as evasiveness (Inwood, who finds the Stoic conclusions undefended).