A Reader’s Guide to the Corpus

 

A Reader’s Guide to the Corpus

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

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This guide orders the corpus by function for the reader. It is not the registry: the System Map holds the complete numbered inventory of every ratified document, its status, and its corrections. What follows is the shape of the whole — eight layers, each described, with its principal documents named.

I. Foundations

The system rests on six philosophical commitments: Substance Dualism (C1), Libertarian Free Will (C2), Ethical Intuitionism (C3), Foundationalism (C4), the Correspondence Theory of Truth (C5), and Moral Realism (C6). Each commitment carries its own essay; the essays for C2, C3, and C6 are grounded in direct quotation from Sterling’s primary texts. The commitment integration documents and the atomic foundation dependency structure establish how the six relate to one another and which theorems each one carries.

II. The System Itself

The center of the corpus is Core Stoicism, Sterling’s twenty-nine-line skeleton of Stoicism (ISF, September 19, 2005), in which he undertook to show how the ideas of Stoicism are connected — how they flow. The Core Stoicism Spelled Out series discharges the spelling-out Sterling never systematically performed, one document per line, with the Series Index as its spine. The Prose Model of the Sterling System presents the whole in continuous prose; the Joints explainer treats the connective structure directly.

III. Practice

The Five-Step Method is the system’s practical engine, operating in two modes: the standing disposition, in which correct belief is already in place before impressions arrive, and the recovery audit, in which a completed failure is traced back to the judgment that produced it. The Five-Step Inner Dialogue Instrument executes the method in dialogue form. The correct-belief companion documents state what the standing disposition consists in and its simplest logical form.

IV. Instruments

The corpus works through ratified instruments — fixed procedures with mandatory self-audits. Principal among them: the Sterling Logic Engine (SLE) for correspondence verdicts and action questions; the Sterling Decision Framework (SDF) for decisions; the Classical Presupposition Audit (CPA) for individual thinkers; the Classical Field Audit (CFA) for whole disciplines; the Classical Restoration Instrument (CRI) for founder generations; the Narrative Character Audit (NCA) for literary figures; and the Commitment Dependency Screen (CDS) for testing what a passage actually rests on. The full suite is registered in the System Map.

V. The Audit of the Fields

The instruments have been run across the modern intellectual landscape: nineteen fields audited under the CFA, individual thinkers audited in clusters under the CPA, founder generations examined under the CRI, and eighteen Field Restoration Syntheses stating what each field looks like restored on classical foundations. This layer is the corpus’s sustained argument that the six commitments were displaced by professional fashion, not refuted.

VI. Applied Work

The system applied to particular material: the procrastination series, running thirteen types through the Five Steps; the chapter-by-chapter Narrative Character Audit of The Great Gatsby; the one-hundred-application lists rendering the corpus operational for specific readers; and the situational deployment matrices.

VII. Primary Sources

The documentary base: Sterling’s posts to the International Stoic Forum (2007–2022), recovered from the archive, dated, and filed with authorship confirmed. Where the corpus asserts what Sterling held, these documents are the warrant.

VIII. Governance

The corpus governs itself through the System Map (the complete registry), the HTML Rendering Standard, the corrections registry, and the corrective-layer documents — including the two essays on LLM use, which state why a corpus of this kind requires a human ratifying authority and what that requirement demonstrates about the six commitments themselves.

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Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.