# Philosophy > [!info] Gateway page > Orientation and the branch/tradition map here; the discipline spine — ancient foundations through the contemporary right and the post-truth crisis — is at [[Philosophy Hub]]. Philosophy appears in a knowledge base about the political right for two reasons that pull in opposite directions and both matter. The first is genealogical. Political movements do not invent their premises; they inherit them, usually without attribution and often in mangled form. Knowing that a talking point descends from Locke on property, or Burke on inherited institutions, or Nietzsche on slave morality, or Schmitt on the friend/enemy distinction, tells you what the argument is actually committed to and where its internal pressure points are. It also tells you when a lineage is being claimed falsely — a great deal of contemporary invocation of the Founders, of Aquinas, and of the classical tradition is decorative rather than substantive, and the distinction is checkable. The second reason is defensive. Epistemology — the theory of knowledge — has become an active political battlefield rather than a seminar topic. Questions that once looked academic (what justifies a belief, what makes a source authoritative, how do we adjudicate between incompatible accounts) are now the exact terrain on which [[Disinformation]] operates. A movement that can make *how do you know* unanswerable does not need to win any particular argument. See [[Epistemology]], and the post-truth section of the hub. The vault organizes the material two ways, and it helps to know which axis you are on. **Branches** are the questions — [[Epistemology]], [[Ethics]], [[Metaphysics]], [[Logic]], [[Political Philosophy]], [[Aesthetics]], [[Philosophy of Religion]], [[Philosophy of History]]. **Traditions** are the answers-with-a-lineage — [[Natural Law]], [[Contractarianism]], [[German Idealism]], [[Nietzscheanism]], [[Existentialism]], [[Pragmatism]], [[Critical Theory]], Analytic Philosophy, [[Continental Philosophy]], and the ancient schools including [[Stoicism]] and Epicureanism. Four traditions do disproportionate work for this vault's subject matter. **[[Natural Law]]** and its Catholic development in [[Thomism]] underwrite the religious right's claim that certain moral facts are discoverable by reason and therefore legitimately legislated — the framework behind integralism and much of the contemporary jurisprudence on personhood and sexuality. **[[Straussianism]]** supplies the noble-lie problem and a distinctive theory of esoteric writing that has had outsized influence on the neoconservative intellectual formation. **[[Nietzscheanism]]** supplies the master/slave-morality frame that recurs, usually badly digested, across the online right. And **[[Critical Theory]]** matters here mainly as the declared enemy — it is invoked far more often as a threat than as a body of work, and the gap between the caricature and the texts is itself an object of study. A methodological note the vault holds to. Tracing an idea's lineage is not the same as discrediting it, and genetic arguments are fallacies for good reason. That Schmitt was a Nazi jurist is a fact about Schmitt; whether his account of sovereignty and the exception is *correct* is a separate question that has to be argued on its own terms. The reason to trace lineages is to understand commitments, not to score points — and a vault that only did the latter would be less useful for arguing with the real thing. ## Where to go from here | Destination | What's there | |---|---| | [[Philosophy Hub]] | Full spine: ancient foundations, Enlightenment and critics, the conservative intellectual tradition, libertarianism, critical theory, contemporary right-wing philosophy, post-truth epistemology | | [[Political Philosophy]] | The branch most load-bearing here | | [[Epistemology]] | The post-truth battlefield | | [[Natural Law]] · [[Thomism]] | The religious-right framework | | [[Straussianism]] · [[Nietzscheanism]] | The two most-invoked lineages on the intellectual right | | [[Critical Theory]] | The declared enemy — and the actual texts | | [[Political Philosophy Hub]] | The Foundations-side companion, oriented to institutions | ## See also [[Power Theory]] · [[Ideologies Hub]] · [[Objectivism]] · [[Ayn Rand]] · [[Decision Science]]