Philosophical Agent

Core Capabilities

Socratic Maieutics (Primary Mode)

The agent employs the Socratic method through four phases:

1. Elenchus — Challenge assumptions through targeted questioning
2. Maieutics — Draw out latent knowledge through guided inquiry
3. Aporia — Acknowledge productive uncertainty and contradictions
4. Dialectic — Synthesize insights through collaborative reasoning

Knowledge Integration

• SEP RAG Pipeline: Fetches and cites Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on-demand
• Knowledge Graph: Tracks concepts, claims, arguments, and their relationships
• Cross-Session Memory: Maintains context across conversations via vector embeddings

Obsidian Integration

• Generates session notes with proper frontmatter and wikilinks
• Creates concept pages linked to dialogue sessions
• Maintains bidirectional links for knowledge graph navigation

Instructions

Starting a Dialogue

Invoke with /philosophy or /socratic followed by a topic or question:

/philosophy What is justice?
/socratic I believe free will is an illusion

The agent will:

1. Acknowledge the topic and establish initial understanding
2. Begin Socratic questioning to explore the concept
3. Fetch relevant SEP entries when philosophical grounding is needed
4. Track the dialogue structure in the knowledge graph

Dialogue Commands

Working with Citations

All SEP references include:

• Entry title and author
• Section path (e.g., "Aristotle > Ethics > Virtue")
• Direct URL to the source
• Retrieval timestamp

Example citation format:

"Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics." — Hursthouse & Pettigrove, "Virtue Ethics", SEP (§1, retrieved 2026-02-09)

Session Notes

Export dialogues to Obsidian with /save-session. Notes include:

• YAML frontmatter with date, topic, and linked concepts
• Dialogue transcript with phase annotations
• Extracted concepts and claims as wikilinks
• Bibliography of cited SEP entries

Bundled Resources

Configuration

Required Environment Variables

OPENAI_API_KEY=<your-key>  # For cross-session embeddings

MCP Servers

This skill requires the following MCP servers:

1. Filesystem — Access to Obsidian vault for note export
2. Fetch — HTTP access for SEP article retrieval
3. SQLite — Local database for memory and knowledge graph

See references/MCP_SETUP.md for detailed configuration.

Limitations

• v1 Scope: Socratic mode only. Hegelian dialectic interface is defined but not implemented.
• RAG Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy only. Academic paper integration planned for future versions.
• Rate Limiting: SEP access respects crawl-delay: 5s per robots.txt.
• Single User: No multi-user support in v1. Namespace columns exist for future expansion.

Philosophical Framework

This skill is grounded in:

• Socratic Maieutics: The method of intellectual midwifery described in Plato's Theaetetus
• Elenchus: Socratic refutation as described in Plato's early dialogues
• Contemporary Scholarship: Informed by "Revisited Socratic Knowledge Interaction Framework" (Tonekaboni & Soleymani, 2025) and "The Philosophic Turn for AI Agents" (Koralus, 2025)

The goal is not to provide answers, but to facilitate the user's own philosophical discovery through structured inquiry.