Western philosophy
One tradition among several, and the one this corpus is deepest in. Western philosophy is the tradition of systematic, argued inquiry — running from the ancient Greeks through the present — into the most general questions about reality, knowledge, value, and existence. Its classic branches:
Reframed 2026-08-04. This page opened as “the umbrella node of this spoke,” which it no longer is: the spoke’s scope was widened that day to philosophy in any tradition, and neo-confucianism is the first of the others. The branches below are still the corpus’s working carve-up of the subject and they travel further than the tradition does — neo-confucianism is squarely metaphysics and ethics — but “Western” now names a lineage here, not the boundary.
- Metaphysics — what there is and what it’s like (being, substance, mind and matter, cause, freedom).
- Epistemology — what knowledge is and how it’s possible (reason vs. the senses, doubt, certainty, truth).
- Ethics — how to live and what is good (virtue, value, the good life).
- Phenomenology / philosophy of existence — the structure of lived experience and what it means to be.
What makes it a single conversation is that thinkers argue across centuries: each builds on, answers, or overturns those before. This wiki tracks the philosophers and the positions, and — in synthesis — the live disagreements between them.
The founding corpus, and its through-lines
Two eras seeded the spoke, joined by a shared habit of refounding the tradition:
- Ancient Stoicism — stoicism and its figures: dionysius-the-renegade (the school’s apostate), quintus-lucilius-balbus (Stoic theology via Cicero), attalus-stoic (Stoicism as a way of life, Seneca’s teacher).
- Early-modern rationalism — rene-descartes (the cogito, dualism) and baruch-spinoza (one-substance monism).
- 19th–20th-c continental philosophy — friedrich-nietzsche (nihilism, the critique of morality) and martin-heidegger (the question of Being, being-in-the-world).
The connective threads so far: the fate of the thinking subject (Descartes → Spinoza → Heidegger), the reach of reason (rationalism vs. Nietzsche’s perspectivism), and ethics as a way of life (stoicism, echoed in Spinoza’s understanding-as-freedom).
Related
rationalism · mind-body-problem · nihilism · stoicism · rene-descartes · baruch-spinoza · friedrich-nietzsche · martin-heidegger