One question, twelve philosophers, roughly 2,400 years of thought. A local app I built that routes any question through history's greatest minds — from Socrates to Hannah Arendt — each used as a distinct reasoning lens, then has an oracle named Xiao synthesize one spoken verdict.
Michael Paycer
Not a chatbot impersonating Socrates or Kant. Each philosopher is used as a lens — a structured way of looking at a problem — so a single question gets examined from twelve genuinely different angles at once: virtue, duty, consequences, power, suffering, simplicity, rights, faith-and-reason, and relentless questioning.
12 permanent philosophers
~2,400 years, Socrates to Arendt
Xiao speaks the verdict
No books — philosophy only
Claude Opus 4.8 · Sonnet 4.6 · Haiku 4.5
Wake word “Xiao” · ElevenLabs
All twelve sit in a ring around Xiao and answer every question, each defined by the question it presses. Socrates is the lone exception to the format — he answers only in questions.
Not a thirteenth philosopher, but the council's voice: she weighs all twelve answers, names where they clash, and reads the final verdict aloud.
An empty chair — not an advisor. It asks the one thing analysis forgets: who pays the price if this decision is wrong?
Records the decision, the assumptions, and later what actually happened — so the council becomes a record of your judgment over time.
Learning a single philosopher. Toggle everyone off but one to study how that mind alone reasons, then back on for the contrast. “Should I keep a promise that has become costly?” reads very differently through Kant, Mill, and Confucius.
Studying theory and comparing traditions. Point one abstract prompt at the whole council to see a tradition map on a single screen; the Where They Clash field names which two thinkers disagree and on what.
Working through ethics and real decisions. The council returns the core issue, each take, the central disagreement, a recommendation, and the hard question you must answer before acting.
Questions of pure theory. “Is free will compatible with determinism?”, “Does power corrupt, or reveal?” — Aquinas, Nietzsche, and Arendt earn their seats here.
Asked “Should I keep a promise that has become costly?”, the council split cleanly — Kant held the rule, Mill weighed the harm, Confucius asked what the relationship demands. Then Xiao rendered the verdict.
“Keep the promise unless breaking it spares someone real and serious harm they never agreed to bear. If you break it, do it openly and carry the cost yourself — that is the difference between a hard choice and a convenient one.”
The heart of the project is the per-member framework brief — about 250 words of structured prose that acts as each philosopher's operating manual. All twelve follow the same schema so the voices stay distinct yet comparable: who they were, the seat and lens they hold, the question they always press, what they're best and worst for, their blind spot, how they disagree, and a fixed output shape.
At runtime a prompt builder assembles the active members into one request and requires strict JSON — core issue, per-member verdicts, where they clash, a recommendation, the hard question, and Xiao's spoken verdict. The app is a clone of the Decision Council, re-rostered to twelve philosophers with the guests and books removed.
A local app that sends one question to twelve philosophers spanning roughly 2,400 years, each a distinct reasoning framework, then has an AI oracle named Xiao synthesize the core issue, where the thinkers clash, a recommendation, the hardest unasked question, and a final spoken verdict.
This council is philosophers only — all twelve are permanent, with no guest advisors and no sacred-text moral seat. The Decision Council mixes philosophers with presidents, CEOs, a field observer, and three books. Both share Xiao, voice, court roles, and the decision log.
It runs locally in Python and Streamlit against the Anthropic Claude API, with optional ElevenLabs voice and browser speech input. Each philosopher is one authored framework block assembled into a single strict-JSON request.
Michael Paycer, a SQL Server DBA and developer in St. Cloud, Minnesota, built it as a personal project, re-rostering his Decision Council framework to twelve philosophers.
The Decision Council runs the same engine with a wider room — philosophers plus presidents, CEOs, a field observer, and three sacred books — built to reach a verdict.