What the Library Is For

The rest of this site argues. The Library does not.

Everything in this section exists to make the arguing easier to navigate, easier to check, and easier to leave. It holds four kinds of thing.

Definitions. The glossary sets out every term this tradition uses in a particular way. Some of those terms are ordinary words being used narrowly. A few are terms invented here, which is always worth knowing about a body of writing, because invented vocabulary is one of the ways a set of ideas makes itself harder to argue with. Each entry links to the page that argues for the term, so a definition can be tested against its source rather than accepted on its own.

Routes. The reading paths propose orders in which to read this site, depending on what brought you. They are suggestions with reasons attached, not a syllabus. Nothing is withheld from anyone who reads in a different order, and there is no sequence in which the material becomes more advanced.

Symbols. Four images recur here. The page on them explains what each is meant to carry, and — more usefully — what the tradition deliberately keeps out of its imagery, and why.

Directions outward. The further-study page points at fields and questions rather than at a curated list of titles. That is a deliberate limitation, explained on the page itself.

What is not here

There is no bibliography of works this tradition claims to descend from, because it does not claim descent from any.

There is no anthology of quotations from real people. Nothing on this site quotes a living or historical figure, because we could not verify attributions to a standard we would be willing to defend, and a misattributed quotation is a small forgery that spreads easily.

There is no archive of scholarship, no research summaries, and no statistics. Where a claim needed a number to be persuasive, the claim was made without one or not made at all.

There are no reading lists produced by asking a language model what to read. Models generate plausible titles, and plausible titles are the failure mode most likely to survive review, because a fabricated book sounds exactly like a real one.

How to use it

Look things up. Follow a path if one fits, or ignore all of them. Take the glossary’s definitions as this tradition’s usage rather than as the correct usage of the word.

And if something here is wrong — a definition that misdescribes what a page actually says, a path that sends a reader somewhere unhelpful, a link that goes nowhere — it is worth telling us, because reference material fails quietly. An argument that is wrong provokes disagreement. A definition that is wrong is simply absorbed.