Smith’s Six Types — A Meta-Framework
From Justin E.H. Smith, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton, 2016). Featured on Noble’s syllabus as the capstone text.
What Smith Does
Smith organizes philosophy’s global history not by tradition, geography, or era but by six recurring social roles that philosophers occupy across cultures: the Curiosus (natural philosopher fascinated by particular things), the Sage (master of a culture’s own reasoning who exposes its presuppositions), the Gadfly (engaged critic of society), the Ascetic (practitioner of bodily discipline as philosophical path), the Mandarin (product of professionalized institutional philosophy), and the Courtier (philosopher entangled with power and money).
Each type recurs across traditions. Ascetics appear in Greek, Indian, Buddhist, and Christian contexts. Sages in every civilization. Gadflies wherever power exists. The typology is organized by what philosophers do and are, not what they think — which is precisely what makes it cross-culturally portable.
The Core Argument
Smith’s most cited formulation: philosophy is to Philosophia as dance is to ballet. Ballet is European by historical accident; dance is universal. The European philosophical tradition is one cultural inflection of a universal human activity. He directly challenges Hegel’s claim that “Oriental philosophy” fails to qualify as philosophy because it remains entangled with religion and culture — pointing out that this standard would disqualify most of European philosophy’s own history.
The double standard he identifies: Europeans get their systematic institutional tradition recognized as “real” philosophy while non-Western peoples have their equally rigorous thinking dismissed as “mere” cultural practice. This is the gatekeeping mechanism that made the vault’s Western-centrism feel natural rather than chosen.
What It Offers the Vault
Smith’s typology solves the organizational problem we identified: how do you incorporate non-Western philosophical traditions without either flattening them into a grab bag (“non-Western”) or surveying each one separately (which becomes encyclopedic and unusable)?
The answer: organize by what the philosophy is doing — diagnosing, cultivating, critiquing, practicing, institutionalizing, entangling with power — and let thinkers from different traditions appear as data points answering shared questions. Mengzi and Aristotle both cultivate virtue, but their answers differ. Ubuntu and restorative justice both repair harm, but their ontologies diverge. The Dao De Jing and the desire-path principle both emphasize non-coercive emergence, but from radically different metaphysical starting points.
Where It Breaks Down
The six types carry Western inflections despite the universalist ambition. “Gadfly” derives from Socrates. “Courtier” from European court culture. “Mandarin” is literally a Chinese term repurposed to describe Western academic philosophy. Whether these categories truly capture the Indian guru, the Buddhist monk-logician, the African griot-philosopher, or the Nahua elder of the huehuetlatolli remains debatable.
Martin Cohen’s review argued Smith’s content remains substantially Western despite the universalist framing — the six types promise cross-cultural portability but the examples still cluster heavily in European traditions. Robert Sinclair characterized the approach as “semi-anthropological” — valuable for unsettling assumptions but intentionally essayistic rather than systematic.
Smith himself insists the types are “launch points for interesting questions,” not a rigid taxonomy. That limits their utility as a practical organizational skeleton but preserves their philosophical honesty.
What This Changes About the Worn Path
The vault’s current Philosophy Index organizes by function — diagnosis, community formation, incentives, accountability, political theory, identity — which is already closer to Smith’s approach than to a tradition-by-tradition survey. What Smith adds is the explicit meta-argument: this functional organization isn’t just practical convenience, it’s philosophically necessary. Organizing by tradition reproduces the hierarchy where Western philosophy is the standard and everything else is supplementary.
The vault should continue organizing by question and function, but with two changes: (1) each section should draw from multiple traditions answering the same question, not default to Western sources with non-Western additions; (2) the vault should explicitly acknowledge that it’s asking “what does a philosopher do” rather than “what does philosophy say” — which means sources like the huehuetlatolli (oral, intergenerational, communal) count as philosophy on equal footing with Bellah’s sociology or Ostrom’s political economy.