Where do you stand among the philosophers?
Respond to 36 statements about knowledge, reality, ethics, society, freedom and meaning. The instrument places you on six of philosophy's oldest debates, plots you on a map beside Plato, Hume, Kant, Confucius, Nietzsche and 28 others, and identifies the three thinkers whose views lie closest to yours.
- Your archetype and six-axis signature
- Your three closest philosophers, your next ten and your opposite
- A consistency check on your answers
- You on the map of thinkers, plus a shareable result card
- Estimated politics and personality, projected from your philosophy
Everything in Standard, plus 24 prompts that add:
- Measured politics from 6 political-philosophy prompts, not just a projection
- Measured personality on all five traits, including extraversion, which Standard can't estimate
- Traditions your philosophy echoes: your kinship with 15 religious and non-religious traditions, only available in Extended
Your six positions
Consistency check
Each axis was measured by several statements that approach it from different sides. This checks whether your answers agree with each other and points out pairs that pull in opposite directions.
Who you think like
Your likely politics
The quiz never asks about politics, but philosophical views tend to travel with political ones. Views on community, free will, religion and moral rules are linked with left and right, and with how much authority people accept. This section projects your six scores onto a political compass. It's an educated guess, not a measurement.
Your likely personality
Psychologists describe personality with the Big Five traits. Some of them show up in philosophical views and some don't, so each estimate below carries a confidence rating. One trait, extraversion, can't be read from these answers at all, and the page says so instead of guessing.
Traditions your philosophy echoes
Religious and spiritual traditions take positions on many of the same questions philosophers do. This section compares your answers with the classical teachings of fifteen traditions, religious and non-religious. It shows kinship of ideas, not what you believe or should believe: a tradition is also practice, community and history, which no quiz can measure.
The map of thinkers
Choose any two axes. Select a point to read about that thinker.
Share your result
A card with your archetype, your closest philosopher and where you sit on the map. The mini compass uses the two axes chosen on the map below.
The six axes
Each axis is a debate philosophers have argued about for millennia. Neither end is the correct one, and most serious thinkers land somewhere between them. Open any axis to read more.
// Placements are approximate. Each thinker's coordinates are a judgement call based on their best-known work, compressed onto a scale from −1 to +1, and many of them would object to being placed at all. Match percentages measure straight-line distance across all six axes. Treat the map as an invitation to read, not a verdict.
// Quotations come from standard English translations and name the work they appear in. Lines marked "In brief" are our own summaries, not quotations.
// Portraits via Wikimedia Commons, resized and tinted green for this page. Select a name for the original file, its author and its licence. Public domain or no known restrictions: Socrates · Plato · Aristotle · Confucius · Mozi · Epicurus · Augustine · Avicenna · Thomas Aquinas · Thomas Hobbes · René Descartes · Baruch Spinoza · John Locke · David Hume · Immanuel Kant · Jeremy Bentham · G. W. F. Hegel · Arthur Schopenhauer · John Stuart Mill · Søren Kierkegaard · Karl Marx · Friedrich Nietzsche · Ludwig Wittgenstein · Ayn Rand · John Rawls.
// Used under Creative Commons licences: Siddhartha Gautama (photo: พระมหาเทวประภาส วชิรญาณเมธี, CC BY-SA 3.0); Marcus Aurelius (photo: Daniel Martin, CC BY-SA 4.0); Jean-Paul Sartre (photo: unknown photographer, Nationaal Archief, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL); Hannah Arendt (photo: Barbara Niggl Radloff, CC BY-SA 4.0); Simone de Beauvoir (photo: Moshe Milner, CC BY-SA 3.0); Peter Singer (photo: Ula Zarosa, CC BY 2.0); Daniel Dennett (photo: Dmitry Rozhkov, CC BY-SA 3.0).