Ask the Ancients

Most philosophy apps either give you surface-level trivia or ungrounded LLM roleplay. Ask the Ancients is a third option: a RAG chat application where users pick a philosopher, ask a question, and receive a response grounded in their actual writings, with inline citations you can read and verify.

The corpus spans ten philosophers across four traditions: Stoic (Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus), Greek/Western (Aristotle, Spinoza), Indian Orthodox (Patanjali, Shankaracharya), and Indian Heterodox (Buddha, Mahavira, Ramanuja). Every response retrieves semantically relevant passages from the philosopher's texts, builds a cited system prompt, and runs inference through Groq or a user-supplied API key.

The Agora feature lets you put two philosophers side by side on the same question: a dialectic comparison backed by both corpora simultaneously. Anonymous users can explore without signing in; data migrates on optional sign-up.