"Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them at all." -- Henry David Thoreau
This project is a web client for the Syntopicon, an open API of ideas. Inspired by the 1952 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, the name was coined by Mortimer J. Adler as a name for his "collection of ideas". Adler and his team thought the Syntopicon contained all the major contributions to 102 fundamental ideas around which competing schools of Western thought developed over the past 28 centuries. With over 500,000 references to the works of philosophers, scientists, and artists -- from Homer to Shakespeare, Euclid to Einstein, Aristotle to Descartes -- the Syntopicon is a monument of academic labor. But it has fallen into obscurity. This project hopes to revive its use and provide a useful tool for syntopical readers, or anyone interested in persuing a liberal education.
This repo is a a labor of love. Really the database was the labor; I go through a new iteration of this UI every Christmas because it's relaxing. Styling and semantics are kept pretty simple. File structure mostly follows the Next.js /page.tsx pattern for resources on the followings URIs:
/- all topics/topic/[n]- subtopics of topicn/subtopics/[n]- references to subtopicn/passages/[n]- a specfic passage
- React
- Next.js
- Supabase
- a Supabase API URL and key to the Mortimer project. Reach out to @johntrecker for this.
to get started
git clone https://github.com/johntrecker/mortimer
cd mortimer/
pnpm install (or yarn add)
pnpm run devAfter downloading the dependencies pnpm run dev will fire up a local server running on localhost:3000. You can see your changes there.
pnpm run buildsimplecss is used for simplicity. Style sheets in the /styles directory are imported as objects like so, className={styles.flexRowCenter}.
All resources are currenctly available through GET requests to the Mortimer API server hosted on Supabase. Reach out for more info or to get access.
Cf. Supabase.
MIT License, cf. LICENSE for more details.