Seventeen Centuries
A knowledge graph connecting three philosophical texts across seventeen centuries—from Marcus Aurelius (170 AD) to Machiavelli (1513) to Nietzsche (1886)—exploring how ideas of virtue, power, and morality evolved through time.
Overview
This project transforms philosophical texts into an interconnected knowledge graph using IWE. The graph is hierarchical with polyhierarchy support—documents can belong to multiple parent documents simultaneously. A concept like “virtue” can appear under both a book index and a thematic category, reflecting how knowledge naturally connects across domains.
The graph contains 1,200+ documents including:
- 838 text fragments from three books
- 340+ concept files linking philosophical ideas, historical figures, and themes
- Category documents organizing concepts into navigable groupings
Source texts
All source texts are public domain editions from Standard Ebooks:
| Book | Author | Fragments |
|---|---|---|
| Beyond Good and Evil | Friedrich Nietzsche | 296 |
| Meditations | Marcus Aurelius | 515 |
| The Prince | Niccolò Machiavelli | 27 |
Highlights
Some concept files reveal how the same idea carries different meanings across philosophers.
Virtue — For Marcus Aurelius, virtue is acting according to nature and reason, serving the common good as naturally as the eye sees. Machiavelli inverts this: a prince who acts entirely virtuously will be ruined among so much evil. Nietzsche warns against becoming enslaved to one’s own virtues, noting that every virtue inclines toward stupidity.