, home
↑↓ move↵ openesc close

About Hekmat

Hekmat (حکمت) means wisdom. Like Ganjoor for Persian poetry, it gathers the great philosophers in one place, but instead of one label per thinker, each answers the same questions, with the passage behind every answer.

Method

The question bank is an explicit, versioned interpretive model (codebook v1.2.0), not a neutral grid. It has 20questions under three pillars, metaphysics, epistemology and axiology, each with a definition, a scope and links to related questions and areas. It changes only through a logged review, and every version maps to the one before.

Questions and stances
Each question names the problem it answers. Every stance has a definition and an example, so two careful readers would code the same text the same way.
Own positions
Where no shared stance fits, a view is coded as the thinker's own position, described in its own terms. It never counts as agreement with anyone else.
Method
How a philosopher thinks is not a single answer. Each profile has a method section: how questions are posed, how views are argued and criticised, the role of reason, experience and intuition, the style of writing, and how all this changes across works.
Not every question applies
A philosopher may reject the question, suspend judgment or not address it. These are recorded with reasons and never counted as stances.
Confidence
Stated in the text means the thinker says it in their own voice in the cited passage, which never applies to Plato's dialogues or to Socrates. Scholarly consensus is a broadly shared reading. Contested readings name the rival camps.
Development
Changes across a thinker's works (e.g. the Republic to the Laws) are shown apart from scholarly disputes.
Passages and quotations
Positions cite standard locators. Where the text is in Hekmat, the citation opens the exact passage, and every quotation is checked word for word against it. So far that covers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche; for the other 16, locators are not yet checked against a text.
Relations
Typed and evidenced. Attested links rest on the later thinker's own words; reported ones on a witness or a standard biography; proposed ones on scholarly inference, and are drawn dashed.
Coding and review
Positions are drafted by an AI model from the primary texts and checked by code. A second AI coder recoded the four classical thinkers blind (68 positions, κ = 0.85), and each disagreement was settled with a recorded reason; AI review panels checked every batch. No philosopher has reviewed the content yet, so all of it is marked draft. Each expert review records a verdict and the reviewer's own grade of the evidence, separate from the drafted confidence; where two experts review the same item, their agreement is measured.
Known limits
22 philosophers: the Greek and European canon and 8 from the Islamic tradition; no women, and nothing yet from Indian, Chinese or other traditions. English translations, mostly early-twentieth-century Loeb. Our categories fit some thinkers, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger above all, less well than others; fit notes say where.

Status

Profiles drafted
22/ 22
Questions
20
Arguments
83
Reviewed by an expert
0/ 780 items

positions 0 of 440 · arguments 0 of 83 · relations 0 of 75 · key terms 0 of 154 · receptions 0 of 6

Positions440
  • Stated in the text 131
  • Scholarly consensus 217
  • Contested reading 92
Questions answered376of 440
  • Rejects the question 15
  • Suspends judgment 6
  • Not addressed 43
Arguments
83reconstructed
Works
20335 readable here
Quotations
222checked word for word

Sources

Portrait credits

From Wikimedia Commons, shown in monochrome. Licences as listed.