The ideas behind the reading.

Traditions

The sixteen schools a reading is matched against — what each holds, where it is commonly misread, and one serious challenge to it.

• StoicismHellenistic / Roman (c. 300 BCE – 180 CE)A rational, ordered cosmos in which the one thing fully yours is your own judgement.
• EpicureanismHellenistic (c. 307 BCE onward)The world is atoms and void, the gods don't trouble themselves with us, and death is nothing.
• Aristotelian virtue ethicsClassical Greece (4th c. BCE)Everything has a function, and the human function is reasoned activity done well.
• Kantian deontologyEnlightenment (late 18th c.)Morality is a demand of reason, not desire: act only on principles you could will everyone to follow, and treat every rational being as an end, never merely a means.
• UtilitarianismModern (late 18th – 19th c.)The right action is the one that produces the most well-being, counting everyone equally.
• Existentialism19th–20th c.There is no fixed human essence handed to you in advance: you exist first and define yourself through your choices.
• Absurdism20th c.The 'absurd' is the collision between our hunger for meaning and a universe that stays silent.
• PragmatismAmerican, late 19th – 20th c.Ideas are tools, and their meaning and truth lie in what difference they make in experience.
• Pyrrhonism (classical skepticism)Hellenistic (c. 300 BCE) – Sextus Empiricus (2nd c. CE)For every argument there seems to be an equal and opposite one.
• Buddhism (core philosophy)c. 5th c. BCE onwardSuffering comes from craving and from clinging to a fixed self that isn't there.
• ConfucianismClassical China (c. 500 BCE onward)A person becomes fully human by cultivating virtue and honouring the web of relationships and rituals that bind a good society.
• Nietzschean perspectivism19th c.There are no facts free of a viewpoint, and the old sources of value have collapsed ('God is dead').
• Classical liberalismEnlightenment – 19th c.The individual, with rights that precede the state, is the basic political unit.
• Communitarianism20th c.The self is not a chooser standing outside all attachments but a person constituted by community, tradition, and shared narrative.
• RomanticismLate 18th – 19th c.Against the cool machinery of Enlightenment reason, Romanticism exalts feeling, imagination, nature, and the authentic self.
• PostmodernismLate 20th c.A stance of suspicion toward the grand stories modernity told about reason, progress, and truth.

The axes

The nine questions a reading maps you onto — the poles of each, and, just as important, what each one does not measure.

• The nature of realityWhat is the world, underneath everything, actually made of?
• How we knowWhen you want to know something, what do you trust to get you there?
• What makes an action rightWhen you judge whether an act was right, what are you really weighing?
• Where meaning comes fromDoes life's meaning come to you, or does it come from you?
• What people are like underneathIs there a fixed human nature, or are people mostly shaped by circumstance?
• Free willHow free are your choices, really?
• The individual and the groupWhen the group and the person pull in different directions, which do you weight?
• How power should be arrangedHow should authority and rank be arranged among people?
• How change should happenWhen something's wrong with the order of things, how much are you willing to disturb?

Lenses

The Jungian archetypes — a 20th-century interpretive lens for colour and resonance, never a measurement of anyone.

Notes

Short pieces on how to read the reading — the plain-speech starting points.

• What we mean by a worldviewNot a badge you wear — a set of standing bets about how things are.
• Why resemblance, not a labelThe difference between saying your answers resemble a tradition and saying you simply are one is the whole product.
• The four temperaments, and what the ancients actually saidA tour through one very old, very sticky typology — and why we don't use it as one.

How we read

The pipeline in plain speech, what every provenance tag means, and what Inner Axis will not claim.

How we read: the tags a reading uses

Every claim a reading makes carries one of these tags, so you can always see on what basis a line was written.