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The great conversation

Nous

Walk seventeen ages of philosophy, from Socrates at a harbor gate in Piraeus to a machine that judges in our own time. Find where each age's certainty breaks, and carry the new question on.

Coming to the App StoreSee the road

Not a lecture. An argument you win.

In each chapter a great thinker holds a claim about how things are. You gather evidence by walking and looking, cross-examine the people who defend it, and break the claim with what you found. A new question is born from the pieces.

Cross-examine

Lay what you saw against what a witness says. Press him, find the statement your evidence breaks, and watch the claim crack.

Build the case

Doubt the world away with Descartes, picture a fact with Wittgenstein, turn Kant's orrery and predict what Mars will do.

Your road

Every view you give is kept. Later thinkers answer it, you may hold your ground or change your mind, and Socrates asks after it at the end.

Athens: the Garden and the Painted Stoa
Athens
Baghdad and Córdoba
Baghdad · Córdoba
Fustat, Old Cairo
Fustat
Edinburgh, Hume's billiard table
Edinburgh
Paris, the Café de Flore
Paris

Every source is real, and every quotation carries its place.Plato · Aristotle · Augustine · Ibn Rushd · Maimonides · Aquinas · Descartes · Spinoza · Hume · Kant · Hegel · Mill · Nietzsche · Wittgenstein · Beauvoir · Rawls

The road

Seventeen ages, one conversation. Each chapter carries a question in, breaks the age's claim, and hands a new question to the next.

  1. I
    The Just Gate
    Piraeus · 5th century BC · Socrates
  2. II
    The Grove of Akademos
    Athens · 4th century BC · Plato, Aristotle
  3. III
    The Garden and the Porch
    Athens · about 300 BC · Epicurus, the Stoics
  4. IV
    The Halls of Memory
    Hippo Regius · AD 397 · Augustine
  5. V
    The House of Wisdom
    Baghdad · Isfahan · Córdoba · Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd
  6. ✦
    The Guide for the Perplexed
    Fustat · about 1190 · Maimonides
  7. VI
    The Disputation
    Paris · 1270 · Thomas Aquinas
  8. VII
    The Stove-Heated Room
    Neuburg · 1619 · Descartes
  9. ✦
    God or Nature
    The Hague · 1670 · Spinoza
  10. VIII
    The Billiard Table
    Edinburgh · 1753 · Hume
  11. IX
    The Philosopher's Walk
    Königsberg · 1788 · Kant
  12. X
    The Owl and the Will
    Berlin · 1820 · Hegel, Schopenhauer
  13. XI
    The Greatest Happiness
    London · 1822–1866 · Bentham, Mill
  14. XII
    The Leap and the Hammer
    Copenhagen · Sils Maria · Kierkegaard, Nietzsche
  15. XIII
    The Fly-Bottle
    Vienna · Cambridge · Wittgenstein
  16. XIV
    The Café de Flore
    Paris · 1945 · Sartre, Beauvoir
  17. XV
    Behind the Veil
    Harvard, 1971 · and today · Rawls

The Symposium

Sit down with the thinkers you have met and ask them anything. Set two of them arguing. They answer in their own voices, from their own works, and they know nothing after their own lifetimes. (Optional; an AI writes their replies, and the game asks your permission first.)