About Syntopi.com
What this is
The Gospel of John opens with the famous line Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος — usually translated as "In the Beginning was the Word." But the humanist Erasmus, in a move that scandalized his century, translated Λόγος as sermo — "conversation."
This project takes Erasmus seriously. Conversation is the beginning of understanding. Syntopi.com continues three thousand years of the world's best thinkers trying to understand one another through dialogue.
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 digitizes the scaffold Adler built. Where his 1950s reader had to open the Syntopicon, find a citation, then open another volume to a specific page to read the passage, ours resolves all of it in one click. 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.
The people and the collaboration
Tom Cohen is a classically educated liberal artist with a Bachelor of Arts in the Great Books from Saint Mary's College and a Master of Arts in the Humanities from Dominican University. Currently Public Information Officer for Los Angeles Unified, he has fifteen years of experience writing and working in education for organizations like the Berggruen Institute. He has had the dream for a digital Syntopicon since 2017 when he wrote his essay Mapping Big Thinkers and Their Ideas. He conceived, directs, and curates Syntopi.com.
This edition of Syntopi.com was built in collaboration with Claude, Anthropic's conversational AI. Claude worked alongside Tom — extracting passages from public-domain EPUBs, parsing Adler's 1952 outline across 64 authors, fixing thousands of citation compound patterns, building the editor, the Galaxy, and the Seminar, sourcing portrait engravings from public-domain archives, and refining the UX across hundreds of iterations.