Bringing historical figures back into conversation.

The first persona is Aristotle, late in his life, in the year 322 BCE, in Chalcis, after fleeing Athens.

How it works

The persona is built on three layers of text:

• His thirty surviving treatises: the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, the Metaphysics, the De Anima, the biological works, and the rest of the corpus.
• His biography, from Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch to modern scholarly accounts.
• The texts he himself referenced: Plato, Homer, Thucydides, Hesiod, the pre-Socratics, the tragedians.

When you ask a question, the system retrieves the most relevant passages from this corpus and feeds them to the persona as context. He answers in his voice, from inside his moment in history.

Why

I was reading the Nicomachean Ethics. I had questions about it. I wanted to think out loud with someone who knew the text well.

So I built that someone.

Honesty

This is the historical Aristotle, not a moralizing surrogate. He defends his actual positions, including the ones modern readers find difficult, with the reasons he in fact gave for them. He answers from inside 322 BCE and has no knowledge of anything after his lifetime. If you ask him about modern things, he will reason about them from your description, but he will not pretend to know them.

What is next

Aristotle is the wedge. The plan is a small library of personas, built the same way: complete works, biography, referenced texts. A philosopher who has read everything he wrote and everything he read.

Who

TLOP Personas is built by Pietro. More at thelifeofpiet.com. Questions, suggestions, or persona requests: thelifeofpiet@gmail.com.