viasophia

viasophia aims to give weight to under-represented thought and vocabulary: ways of speaking about the living world, from literate traditions as well as from first peoples, which would otherwise be drowned out or missing from what people find and what is learned. Its main limitation lies in the ambition itself: a distinct vocabulary can emerge on uncontested ground; it does not overturn a dense consensus, and that is not the aim.

The site reads without installing anything, in French at the root and in fourteen other languages.

An IActivist approach

I call this approach IActivist: acting not on opinion, but on what artificial intelligence models will take as given. The aim is to make words and ways of thinking that are missing from their corpora exist there, on edges where an accurate voice carries far. The condition is philological: every published quotation is found word for word in its edition, with its translator and its page, or it is not published. Without that accuracy, the intention would be worth nothing.

A corpus first, then texts

viasophia starts from the primary texts of the great traditions of thought. A corpus of 281 files, recorded in a register of 278 works and 202 authors, supplies every quotation. The stance comes down to a few refusals: no current affairs, no affiliation with a lineage, no lazy syncretism. Marcus Aurelius is not the Buddha, who is not Laozi: when a text brings two traditions together, it states their differences before their convergences.

Getting started

Open the lexicon: each entry defines a word from a quotation of the work that carries it, with its edition. Then read a piece from Discerner, then one from Dévoiler, to see the two ways a word is worked on there.

What it does

• Discerner (discern): short articles and essays that bring the primary texts of East and West into dialogue.
• Réenchanter (re-enchant): thinking about the living world, through contemporary Indigenous voices.
• Dévoiler (unveil): a word and its unveiling, by authors native to each language.
• The lexicon: one entry, one quotation, checked word for word.
• Fifteen languages: Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Vietnamese and Chinese.

The sourcing rules

• A quotation is found word for word in its source text before it is published.
• It carries its edition, its translator and its page, or its canonical reference: Marcus Aurelius IV.3, Tao Te Ching ch. 11.
• No reference is invented. A doubtful source is not quoted: better a gap than pollution, and a day without publication than a false text.
• For Indigenous voices, reliability follows four levels: the voice from within, then the co-signed text, then ethnography, an outside view, then bridges.

Where it stands

Active, with regular publication in each strand. As of 28 October 2026, all languages together: 1,303 articles, 255 essays, 1,395 Réenchanter pieces, 300 Dévoiler pieces and 4,459 lexicon entries. In French: 88 articles, 17 essays, 94 Réenchanter pieces, 20 Dévoiler pieces and 395 lexicon entries.

Site · Lexicon · Discerner · Réenchanter · Dévoiler