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.
Discourse on the Method
"I think, therefore I am" — Descartes's first public statement of the cogito and of the method of doubt that founds modern philosophy
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Discourse on the Method (Mid (1637, in mature middle age; preceding the Meditations of 1641)) |
|---|---|
| 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 | Total |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Disembodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| 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
Discourse on the Method
The temporal structure of the Discourse is autobiographical: the years of doubt giving way to the foundational discovery. Time itself is Newtonian-substantival background.
Space
Discourse on the Method
Cartesian res extensa — extension as the essence of body. The Discourse's Part V develops the mechanist analysis of extended substance.
Matter
Discourse on the Method
The animal as machine; the physical world as extended substance in motion, governed by mechanical laws.
Observer
Discourse on the Method
The thinking subject as the bedrock — the first genuinely first-personal philosophical observer. Disembodied in essence, though enwombed in a body; God as personal-providential framework.
Energy
Discourse on the Method
Implicit: motion in the extended world is the continuation of God's creative act. Not thematised in the Discourse.
Information
Discourse on the Method
Clear and distinct ideas as the preserved information of rational knowledge; the cogito as the founding personal information.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
The Discourse's status as founding charter of modern subjectivity has been simultaneously celebrated (by rationalists and analytic philosophers) and criticised (by Heidegger, Levinas, Foucault, feminist critics, embodied-cognition theorists) for separating the thinking self from its embodied, social, historical situation. The relation between the Discourse and the more rigorous Meditations (1641) is itself an interpretive question — the Meditations sometimes read as a corrective to the Discourse's more ambitious claims. Descartes's mechanist treatment of animals in Part V has been increasingly criticised as morally and biologically inadequate.