Dialectica · 思辨谱

A bilingual (English / 中文) atlas of philosophy in the style of Mondrian. It draws the family tree of 72 schools and the network of 204 thinkers across eight traditions, from the Upanishads and the Hundred Schools to analytic philosophy, and shows where each idea came from, the reasoning behind it, who taught, read and argued with whom, and where traditions met.

Live site: https://dialectica.geekplux.com/ (中文)

Colour always means tradition. Where its sibling Worldlines is all grids, Dialectica puts people in the grid and follows the lines between them.

• Eight faces. The hero is a Mondrian grid of portraits, one thinker from each tradition in the likeness their own century left of them, in black and white until you hover. A new eight is dealt on each visit.
• Lineage. Every school is a block on a shared time axis, one lane per tradition, drawn for as long as it lasted. Lines join schools: solid when an idea is carried forward, dashed red when one school argues against another, dotted blue when an idea crosses between traditions. Select a school to light up its direct links or its whole lineage, and filter by branch (metaphysics, knowledge, ethics, politics, logic and language, mind, God and the ultimate). Hover a line to read what passed along it.
• Thinkers. Each thinker is a square placed at about the age of forty. Ties join teachers to students, readers to the writers who shaped them, and critics to their targets; each kind can be switched off.
• Crossings. A matrix, after Bertin: rows give, columns receive, and each square counts the school links and thinker ties that crossed from one tradition into another. Select a square to read every crossing behind it.
• Questions. Seven big questions (what is real, how we know, how to live, what makes power legitimate, what the self is, whether words reach the truth, whether there is a ground of everything), each answered by a dozen schools in time order, with a small map of where each answer sits.
• Schools. An index of every school by tradition, each with a sparkline of its lifetime on the shared time axis.
• Panels. A school's page gives its question, why it arose, the reasoning behind it, three key claims, what it left, its thinkers and key texts, where it came from and what it led to, and its answers to the big questions. A thinker's page gives their idea, works and schools, their circle (teachers, influences, students, those they shaped and their critics, drawn as one small Mondrian composition), and contemporaries in other traditions. A thinker's panel also has a fuller two-paragraph introduction (life and setting, then the thought explained), and both kinds of panel show the fact checks that concern them.
• Search (/) covers schools, thinkers and works in both languages. Esc closes panels.
• Shareable links. English is the default; ?lang=zh opens the Chinese view. The hash records the open school or thinker, the question and the crossing, e.g. /?lang=zh#s=madhyamaka or /#t=kant&q=know&x=greek.islamic.
• A page for everything. Every school and thinker also has a static page in each language (/schools/stoicism/, /zh/thinkers/kant/), with its own title, description, canonical and hreflang links, Open Graph card and JSON-LD, plus hub pages for all schools and all thinkers. They are written by scripts/build-pages.mjs from the data, so search engines and readers without JavaScript see the whole atlas.
• Fact-check. The first draft's doubts were checked against published scholarship; every verdict, finding and source is published at /fact-check/ and beside the entry it concerns.
• No build step. Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with the content in five data files; the static pages are generated by a dev-time script and committed. A sibling of Art-isms and Worldlines.

Sister atlases

Three bilingual atlases on one Mondrian grid, built the same way: static files with no build step, content in { en, zh } data files, Cloudflare Workers, Google Analytics behind a consent bar. Each site's footer opens with a strip that links to the other two.

	Atlas	What it maps
	Art-isms · 艺术流派志 · code	40 art styles across 45,000 years, how each grew from the last, and three real works for each
	Worldlines · 世界线 · code	26 countries and 8 regions across 15,000 years, chapter by chapter or one year at a time
	Dialectica · 思辨谱 · code	72 schools and 204 thinkers across 8 traditions: who taught, read and argued with whom

Made by GeekPlux. I built these atlases out of my own curiosity, mainly to learn from them myself.

Run it locally

python3 -m http.server 8000 --directory public
# then visit http://localhost:8000

npx wrangler dev also works. Portraits load from Wikipedia, so they need a connection; without one, each panel shows a Mondrian plate instead.

Project structure

public/                 everything that is deployed, and nothing else
  index.html            the atlas: page skeleton, static copy, SEO tags, analytics setup
  assets/styles.css     all styles (paper, ink and De Stijl)
  assets/app.js         the hero, both maps, crossings, questions, panels, search, i18n, routing, consent bar
  assets/page.js        consent bar and page view for the static pages
  data/core.js          traditions, branches, eras of the time axis, the big questions, learning notes
  data/schools.js       every school
  data/thinkers.js      every thinker (with `portrait` written by fetch-portraits)
  data/links.js         links between schools and ties between thinkers
  data/facts.js         the fact checks: verdict, finding and sources
  images/portraits/     hosted portraits (WebP, 600 and 300px)
  schools/, thinkers/, fact-check/, credits/, zh/    generated static pages (do not edit)
  sitemap.xml           generated
  _headers, robots.txt, og.png, favicon.svg, favicon-48.png, apple-touch-icon.png
scripts/check-data.mjs      validates the data, portraits, credits, asset stamps, counts and generated pages
scripts/build-pages.mjs     writes the static pages, the sitemap and the static index in index.html
scripts/fetch-portraits.mjs downloads portraits from Commons and regenerates CREDITS.md
scripts/stamp-assets.mjs    writes ?v=<content hash> into index.html
scripts/lib/                shared helpers (data loading and saving, credits)
docs/                       fact-check record and open questions
CREDITS.md                  image credits (generated)
wrangler.jsonc              Cloudflare Workers Static Assets config

Content model

Every piece of text is a { "en": "…", "zh": "…" } pair. Years are integers; negative years are BCE and there is no year 0.

A school (public/data/schools.js):

{
  "id": "stoicism", "tradition": "greek", "start": -300, "end": 250,     // end 2026 for a living tradition
  "dates": { … },                                                       // display text, e.g. "c. 300 BCE – 3rd c. CE"
  "name": { … }, "branches": ["ethics", "logic", "metaphysics"],
  "idea": { … },        // the core thesis in one sentence
  "question": { … },    // the question it set out to answer
  "origin": { … },      // why it arose
  "reasoning": { … },   // the argument behind it
  "claims": [ {…}, {…}, {…} ],
  "legacy": { … },
  "works": [ { "by": "epictetus", "t": { … }, "y": 108 } ],
  "figures": ["zeno-citium", "chrysippus", "seneca", "epictetus", "marcus-aurelius"],
  "tags": "stoa logos virtue 斯多葛 …",
  "wiki": "Stoicism"    // English Wikipedia title, for the image and "read more"
}

A thinker (public/data/thinkers.js):

{ "id": "epictetus", "tradition": "greek", "born": 50, "died": 135,      // died: null for the living
  "life": { … }, "name": { … }, "role": { … }, "idea": { … },
  "schools": ["stoicism"], "works": [ { "t": { … }, "y": 125 } ], "wiki": "Epictetus" }

For ancient thinkers whose dates are unknown, born/died are conventional placeholders that put them in the right place on the map; life says what is actually known.

Links join schools and ties join thinkers (public/data/links.js). Both read from → to:

kind	Between	Meaning
dev	schools	to carries forward or develops from
react	schools	to reacts against from
fuse	schools	to borrows from from across traditions
taught	thinkers	from was to's teacher
infl	thinkers	from's work shaped to
opp	thinkers	to argued against from

Links carry a one-sentence note on what passed between them; ties may.

Adding or correcting content

1. Edit the data file. Scripts should go through loadData()/saveData() in scripts/lib/data.mjs, which keep the one-entry-per-line layout.
2. To add a portrait, set the thinker's c to a Wikimedia Commons file name (the artwork must be free; see CLAUDE.md), then run node scripts/fetch-portraits.mjs. Look at the image before committing.
3. If you changed assets/app.js or assets/styles.css, run node scripts/stamp-assets.mjs.
4. Run node scripts/build-pages.mjs to regenerate the static pages and sitemap.
5. Run node scripts/check-data.mjs; add --warnings to list thinkers without ties and schools without links.
6. Open the page in both languages, at desktop width and at 390px.

CI runs the same check on every push and pull request; it fails if a stamp, a portrait hash, CREDITS.md or a generated page is stale.

Deployment

The site is served at https://dialectica.geekplux.com/ by Cloudflare Workers Static Assets with Workers Builds (Git integration), like the sibling sites: every push to master runs npx wrangler deploy, which uploads public/ as configured in wrangler.jsonc. The Worker name dialectica must match the Worker in the Cloudflare dashboard. The old dialectica.geekplux.org still serves the same Worker as a secondary domain; canonical tags, the sitemap and every link use .com.

public/_headers caches assets/ and images/ for a year. That is safe because every reference carries a content hash (?v=…) written by scripts/stamp-assets.mjs, scripts/build-pages.mjs and scripts/fetch-portraits.mjs; check-data fails while a hash is stale. HTML and data/ are revalidated on every visit.

Analytics

Google Analytics 4 (G-1MGF28FKRC) runs on dialectica.geekplux.com (and the secondary .org) only, never locally or on preview URLs, set up as in Worldlines. It uses Consent Mode v2: until a visitor accepts in the consent bar, analytics_storage is denied, so GA receives cookieless pings and sets no cookies. Accepted cookies are host-only (cookie_domain: "none"), so they are not shared with Art-isms, Worldlines or any other *.geekplux.com site, and declining deletes any _ga cookies. Page views are sent by app.js after the page has rendered, without the hash. In the GA4 property, keep Admin → Data streams → Enhanced measurement → Page views → Show advanced settings → "Page changes based on browser history events" turned off, or each ?lang switch logs an extra page view. Search sends only the number of matches, never the typed text; leaving for a sister atlas sends select_content with content_type: "sister".

Caveats

Schools rarely begin or end in a single year, and many ancient dates are traditional or disputed. Every line is a simplification of conversations that ran for generations, and the selection is deliberately small: a map for learning, not a complete history of philosophy.

License

• Code (public/index.html, public/assets/, scripts/): MIT
• Written content in public/data/: CC BY-SA 4.0
• Portraits in public/images/portraits/ are resized from Wikimedia Commons files and keep their own licences (public domain or Creative Commons); see CREDITS.md. Other images are loaded from Wikipedia at view time.