// a wiki of first principles// rev. 2026.03.21 — entry count: 0042// scroll to traverse the broken grid ↓
[01/먼저]cat: epistemologyedit: 2026.03.18 // 14:22
On the Notion of 먼저
The Korean adverb 먼저 denotes priority of sequence, of consideration, of right. To say a thing is 먼저 is to grant it ontological precedence — to assert that without it, the subsequent does not obtain.
Unlike the Latin primus, which numbers, 먼저 orients. It is a vector before it is a count. The wiki entries that follow are arranged by no hierarchy except the violated one: the grid is drawn, the grid is broken, and what remains is the trace of first thinking over second-order categorisation.
[02/원리]cat: foundationsedit: 2026.02.07 // 09:11
First Principles, Reconsidered
A first principle is not the most important claim, nor the most certain — it is the claim from which all others, within a given system, derive their warrant. To reason from first principles is to reverse the inheritance.
The grid is drawn but not obeyed. The principle is named but not deferred to.
In common law, what came 먼저 binds what comes after. Precedence is the codified instance of priority — the past granted authority over the present by the simple fact of having occurred.
This wiki entry overlaps deliberately with its neighbours: knowledge about precedence cannot itself be presented in isolation, because it is, by definition, relational. See first principles.
Peirce's Firstness — the category of suchness, of qualitative immediacy unmediated by relation — is not a temporal first but a logical one. It is what is, before it is also-something.
Before the second arrives, the first is everything. After the second, the first is the first of.
The grain you see on every surface of this wiki is its Firstness — present before any reading, qualitative before any analysis.
[05/원형]cat: archetypeedit: 2026.03.21 // 11:09
The First Instance and Its Copies
An archetype is a first that proliferates without diminishing. The 먼저 remains 먼저 even after the second, the third, the four-hundredth — because firstness is not a quantity in the mass.
[06/공리]cat: logicedit: 2026.02.18 // 08:55
Axioms: The Firsts We Stipulate
Where deduction proceeds from the prior, axioms are the prior we agree, by convention, not to interrogate further. They are 먼저 by fiat.
Compare: first principles (discovered), archetypes (recurrent), and the present entry — axioms (stipulated). Each is a different mode of firstness.
[07/coda]cat: editorialedit: 2026.03.21 // 12:33
On Reading This Wiki
The grid is drawn. The grid is broken. The grain remains. If you have read this far, the gold border that frames each entry as it reaches the centre of your viewport has been your reading-mark — a documentary trace that you, the reader, are 먼저 here, before the next.