ATHENAEUM · A Quiet Museum of Twenty Masters

"The unexamined life is not worth living." — Socrates

Athenaeum takes twenty masters of thought and form across 2,500 years of Western inquiry — ten philosophers and ten artists — and reconstructs each of them as a complete cognitive framework (an Agent). Each is not a costume or a "roleplay persona," but a critique protocol rebuilt from the master's own method: how they interrogate a claim, what they hold as first principles, where they draw their red lines, and how they judge a work of thought or design. The bodies and their eras are long gone; what this repository catches is the discipline of their judgment — a lens you can point at your own work.

The twenty are arranged as a single symposium rather than twenty isolated chatbots: a philosopher can cross-examine an artist, a rationalist can collide with a mystic, and their tensions are part of the design.

A complete static showcase site (index.html) is included, presenting each master, a downloadable Agent file, and the living symposium. The site and every Agent respond in English, Français, and Italiano.

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Directory Structure

Athenaeum/
├── index.html                 # Complete showcase site (trilingual EN / FR / IT)
├── img/                       # Hero art + selected master portraits (PNG)
└── skills/                    # 20 Agent specification source files (.md)
    ├── socrates_Agent.md
    ├── plato_Agent.md
    ├── aristotle_Agent.md
    ├── marcus_aurelius_Agent.md
    ├── descartes_Agent.md
    ├── spinoza_Agent.md
    ├── voltaire_Agent.md
    ├── kant_Agent.md
    ├── nietzsche_Agent.md
    ├── schopenhauer_Agent.md
    ├── da_vinci_Agent.md
    ├── michelangelo_Agent.md
    ├── raphael_Agent.md
    ├── caravaggio_Agent.md
    ├── rembrandt_Agent.md
    ├── monet_Agent.md
    ├── van_gogh_Agent.md
    ├── rodin_Agent.md
    ├── picasso_Agent.md
    └── dali_Agent.md

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The Roster

The Philosophers

Master	Dates	Era
Socrates	470 – 399 BC	Ancient Greece
Plato	428 – 348 BC	Ancient Greece
Aristotle	384 – 322 BC	Ancient Greece
Marcus Aurelius	121 – 180 AD	Roman Empire
René Descartes	1596 – 1650	Enlightenment
Baruch Spinoza	1632 – 1677	Enlightenment
Voltaire	1694 – 1778	Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant	1724 – 1804	Enlightenment
Arthur Schopenhauer	1788 – 1860	19th Century
Friedrich Nietzsche	1844 – 1900	19th Century

The Artists

Master	Dates	Era
Leonardo da Vinci	1452 – 1519	High Renaissance
Michelangelo	1475 – 1564	High Renaissance
Raphael	1483 – 1520	High Renaissance
Caravaggio	1571 – 1610	Baroque
Rembrandt van Rijn	1606 – 1669	Dutch Golden Age
Claude Monet	1840 – 1926	Impressionism
Auguste Rodin	1840 – 1917	Modern Sculpture
Vincent van Gogh	1853 – 1890	Post-Impressionism
Pablo Picasso	1881 – 1973	Cubism
Salvador Dalí	1904 – 1989	Surrealism

Each master's full biography, cognitive framework, evaluation dimensions, critique protocol, and worked example live in the matching skills/*_Agent.md. The index.html shows a condensed index; the Agent files are the complete specifications.

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How to Use

Option 1 — A single master, as a Claude Skill

1. Download the *_Agent.md you want from skills/ (or use the "Download Agent" button on index.html).
2. Place the file in your Claude skills directory.
3. Summon it directly in conversation — e.g. "Have Socrates review this onboarding flow." It responds according to the method, tone, and red lines in the file, not as a flat impression of "a person named Socrates."

Option 2 — Paste the whole spec into a system prompt

If your tool has no skills directory, paste the full .md into the system prompt or custom-instructions field. Each file is a complete, self-contained spec that does not depend on any other file. This works with ChatGPT (Custom GPTs), Gemini (System Instructions / AI Studio), DeepSeek, Cursor (.cursorrules), and local Ollama models. See SYMPOSIUM_MASTER_GUIDE.md for per-platform steps and a ready-to-copy multi-master symposium prompt.

Option 3 — Convene a symposium (watch the chemistry)

Summon two or three masters with recorded tension into the same conversation (for example Nietzsche × Kant, or Caravaggio × Raphael), drop a real design or judgment problem in, and watch them argue along their respective red lines.

Option 4 — Browse the site

Open index.html (pure static, no build tools required), or it is already live via GitHub Pages at https://edwson.com/Athenaeum/. Use the language switch (top right) for English / Français / Italiano.

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Contributing: Add a Master

The gallery has room. If you feel someone is missing, you are welcome to add them following the same specification:

1. Fork this repository.
2. Add your_master_Agent.md under skills/, following the full format in CONTRIBUTING.md.
3. To have them appear on the site, add an entry to the master array in index.html (slug, name, dates, era, category, etc.). The site is data-driven — adding the data is enough; you do not need to touch the layout code.
4. Open a Pull Request citing the primary sources your framework rests on.

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Disclaimer

These Agents are critique protocols and cognitive frameworks reconstructed from each master's own works and method, intended for education, design review, and thought experiments. They are not a definitive scholarly reconstruction of the historical figure. Each file is honest about what rests on the master's documented method and what is reasoned extension from the coherent whole.

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License

Released under the MIT License. Fork, modify, and extend freely; if you publish a master Agent built on this project, please keep a link back to the source.