Simposeum

Simposeum

About this app

Simposeum puts history's great thinkers in conversation with you. Philosophers, psychologists, theologians and rhetoricians, from Heraclitus to Hannah Arendt, answer in their own voice and reason from their own work.

ASK A THINKER
Put a question to Kant, Simone Weil, William James or Augustine and get an answer in the register they wrote in. Substantive answers are grounded in the thinker's writings, retrieved from their texts as you ask, and cited to the passage, so you can see where an idea comes from and check it. For the ancients whose books are lost, they reason from the fragments and reports that survive.

WATCH THEM ARGUE
Set two thinkers against each other on a question that divides them: Hobbes against Rousseau on human nature, Hume against Aquinas on whether reason can prove God, Marx against Keynes on capitalism. Or convene a panel of several and listen to them take each other on.

TODAY'S DEBATE
Each day, argue one side of a question against a thinker and get a score, with the weak spots in your case named.

LEARN IN THEIR COMPANY
Courses written from the primary sources, each taught by the thinker or narrated around them: Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, Freud's unconscious, the history of how madness has been named, the arguments for the existence of God. Lessons come with the paintings, documents and diagrams of their period, and with questions that test what you understood.

LISTEN
Press Listen and hear a reply read aloud in a synthetic voice made for that thinker. It keeps playing with your phone locked.

FIND THE RIGHT MIND
Describe what you are wrestling with and Simposeum suggests the thinkers who worked on it.

FREE
Every account gets free credits every week. Reading a course costs nothing; conversations and lessons with a tutor draw on the credits.

Simposeum's thinkers are AI. Their replies are generated, not recorded, and can be wrong; the voices are synthetic, not recordings. Simposeum is not affiliated with any of the thinkers, their estates or their publishers.

What’s new

Your profile now keeps the ideas you have defended in lessons, with a level for each thinker.
When a thinker explains one of their ideas in conversation, it is kept on your profile, with the lesson where you can defend it.
Your level with each thinker shows on their card in the Library.
Other readers can see your levels on your profile; a switch in Settings hides them.