There's an old joke that the history of philosophy is just a footnote to Plato. In many ways this is true. Thinkers since ancient Athens have been trying to understand and argue with one another in a long, unfinished conversation. Once locked in ivory towers, that conversation is now yours — on your phone, in your browser, or wherever you like to read.
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In the 1950s, a group of people from the University of Chicago and the Encyclopædia Britannica spent a decade creating the Syntopicon — a two-volume index to everything Western thinkers had said about 102 Great Ideas, from Angel to World. It was built to show that the Western canon is a single long argument carried out across 2,500 years. After the second edition in 1990 it fell out of print and sat on reference-library shelves.
Syntopi.com takes this physical scaffold and digitizes it. Where the 1950s required you to open a book, find a citation, and then open another book to a specific page, we can now pull everything together in an instant. Every Idea links to every author who has written on it. Every author links to every passage they have contributed.
This is for anyone who has a question (or already has an answer) and needs to know — is Antigone a just rebel?, what did the founders mean by liberty? — what everyone has said, pre-organized, with the actual text a click away.