Quick profile
20 statements
About 6–8 minutes. One direct item per lens, clearly marked as lower-resolution.
Position profiler / twenty lenses
Philosophy Profile
Five philosophical conflicts. Twenty rival lenses. Find the theories your answers repeatedly defend—and the ones they reject.
Choose a route
How much resolution do you want?
Both routes cover all twenty lenses. The full route adds a second direct item for every lens and ten cases where plausible positions pull against or alongside one another.
EthicsWhat makes an action right?
Justice and societyWhat makes institutions fair?
Knowledge and inquiryWhat should count as a good reason to believe?
Mind and personal identityWhat makes a mind or person continue?
Meaning and agencyHow should a person live under uncertainty and constraint?
Full profile
40 statements + 10 cases
About 15-20 minutes. Adds consistency detail and philosophically awkward cross-pressures.
Uncertainty counts. “Not sure” leaves that philosophical conflict unresolved and lowers the profile's resolution.
Neutral is an answer. “Neither agree nor disagree” counts as a considered response.
Item 1
Cross-pressure case
Your five-domain map
answer coverage
items answered
Coverage shows how much of the profile you answered. More answers give the competing theories more evidence to fight over.
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Jeremy Bentham
You repeatedly treated the balance of expected benefit and harm as morally decisive.
Useful counter-pressure: Bentham's arithmetic can struggle to explain why an individual's rights should block a larger gain.
Meet Jeremy Bentham in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Immanuel Kant
You protected universal duties and resisted using a person merely as a tool.
Useful counter-pressure: Kant's strict rules can feel unforgiving when a limited exception would prevent terrible harm.
Meet Immanuel Kant in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Aristotle
You made good judgement depend on character, practical wisdom and the shape of a flourishing life.
Useful counter-pressure: Virtue language can leave two otherwise admirable people disagreeing about what this case requires.
Meet Aristotle in the Philosopher Compendiumcare ethics portrait reserved.
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward care ethics
You treated relationships, dependency and the responsibilities created by care as morally significant.
Useful counter-pressure: Special concern can conflict with impartial justice or reproduce unequal expectations about who must provide care.
Named philosopher profile in development
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward John Rawls
You gave special weight to equal liberties and to the prospects of people who are worst placed.
Useful counter-pressure: Rawls must explain how much inequality is genuinely necessary to improve the least advantaged position.
Meet John Rawls in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Robert Nozick
You judged holdings by how they were acquired and transferred rather than by whether the final pattern looked equal.
Useful counter-pressure: Historical entitlement becomes difficult when past acquisition was unjust or its effects cannot be cleanly repaired.
Meet Robert Nozick in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Martha Nussbaum
You asked what people are actually able to do and be, not only what resources they formally possess.
Useful counter-pressure: A public capability list still needs a defensible account of who selects its contents and how conflicts are ranked.
Meet Martha Nussbaum in the Philosopher CompendiumYour philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Jeremy Bentham
You evaluated institutions by the total wellbeing their rules and policies were likely to produce.
Useful counter-pressure: Maximising the total may hide an unfair distribution of benefits and burdens.
Meet Jeremy Bentham in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward René Descartes
You trusted reason to establish some substantial truths beyond what experience alone can supply.
Useful counter-pressure: A clear-seeming chain of reason still needs to show that its concepts reliably reach the world.
Meet René Descartes in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward John Locke
You insisted that claims about the world answer to observation and experience.
Useful counter-pressure: Experience supplies materials for thought, but it may not by itself explain necessity, universality or the structure we bring to inquiry.
Meet John Locke in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward David Hume
You were reluctant to claim knowledge while a serious possibility of error remained open.
Useful counter-pressure: Too demanding a standard can make ordinary reasoning and action impossible to justify.
Meet David Hume in the Philosopher Compendiumpragmatism portrait reserved.
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward pragmatism
You treated ideas as tools within revisable inquiry and asked what practical difference a claim makes.
Useful counter-pressure: Practical success can be temporary or goal-dependent and may not by itself explain truth.
Named philosopher profile in developmentYour philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward René Descartes
You allowed that conscious thought could in principle exist independently of a physical body.
Useful counter-pressure: A separate thinking substance needs an account of how it interacts with the physical world.
Meet René Descartes in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Smart
You treated mental life as physical or as wholly dependent on physical reality. Smart gives that commitment its direct mind-brain identity form.
Useful counter-pressure: Conscious experience and meaning can seem resistant to a wholly physical explanation, while multiple realisability challenges one fixed neural identity.
Meet Smart in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Putnam
You identified mental states through the causal roles they play rather than through one material that realises them. Putnam turns that move into a multiply realisable account of mind.
Useful counter-pressure: Matching a functional role may not capture what an experience feels like or whether a system genuinely understands.
Meet Putnam in the Philosopher CompendiumYour philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward John Locke
You treated memory, intention and character as central to what matters in a person's continuation.
Useful counter-pressure: Memory can be mistaken, partial or circular if it is used to establish the very identity that is meant to validate it.
Meet John Locke in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Simone de Beauvoir
You treated choice as partly self-defining while still recognising the real constraints of a situation.
Useful counter-pressure: Freedom is unequally supported, so an existential account must not turn oppression into an individual's failure to choose well.
Meet Simone de Beauvoir in the Philosopher CompendiumStoicism portrait reserved.
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Stoicism
You placed flourishing in virtue and sound judgement rather than in goods that fortune can remove.
Useful counter-pressure: A narrow focus on individual judgement can understate emotion, injustice and the need to change shared conditions.
Named philosopher profile in development
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Camus
You allowed a person to live lucidly and continue choosing without pretending the world supplies a final meaning. Camus makes that refusal of denial the beginning of revolt rather than surrender.
Useful counter-pressure: Continued revolt alone may not explain moral obligation or why one project deserves commitment over another.
Meet Camus in the Philosopher Compendium
Your philosopher conversation
Your choices leaned toward Zhuangzi
You allowed fixed judgements to loosen when a situation was viewed from another perspective.
Useful counter-pressure: Perspective-shifting must still explain when flexibility becomes evasion or when a judgement should hold firm.
Meet Zhuangzi in the Philosopher CompendiumFour cross-domain affinities
The strongest fits across your domain results
Scores compare each theory with the answers available in your route. Several theories can fit because philosophical commitments overlap and collide.
Five philosophical questions
One leading lens in each domain
Compatible combinations
Positions that can travel together
Review every answer in this route
The argument behind the profile
Your answers make commitments
Your answers commit you to philosophical pressures even when the theories conflict. Consequentialism may dominate one domain while rights, scepticism or existential freedom dominate another.
The strongest result is the theory that explains the largest part of this answer set. The counter-pressure shows the cost: what that theory struggles to protect, explain or permit.
Answers remain in this browser session.