Principia
The first principle of reality, from the ground of being to the edge of knowledge.
Aram Méndez
opus
Principia explains reality. Not a region of it, not matter or number or life or mind, but the whole, from a single ground, in one account that leaves nothing outside itself. The name is Latin for first principles, and for beginnings: one word for what a thing stands on and where it begins. The name is the claim: reality has a first principle, and everything that is follows from it.
It is one argument, published volume by volume, opened by a prologue and held by an appendix. The volumes are not chapters: each asks its own question and answers it whole. Metaphysica stands on nothing before it; Ontologia and Epistemologia stand on the appendix alone, so these three can be read in any order, and the volumes that follow build on them. So far the argument runs from why anything exists at all, through what there is, to how anything can be known.
Principia is the foundational work of Corollaria.
architectura
0GenesisThe End at the BeginningFree
Arithmetic cannot divide by zero, and no faster hand ever will. Genesis follows that one failure to what every instrument of knowing already requires, and finds there the only place a work on first principles can begin.
IMetaphysicaThe Grammar of GroundOct 31
Why is there something rather than nothing? Every answer names a thing, and every thing needs a ground of its own. This volume asks what could ground anything at all, shows why no thing can, and goes on to what can. From that one ground it derives the form everything that exists must take; and the old question does not get an answer. It loses its footing.
Opens October 31, 2026 at 12:00 PM PT.
IIOntologiaThe Tension of BeingNov 30
What there is, asked by something that is. The question is itself a being, so ontology cannot stand outside its subject; it begins inside. From an empty beginning the volume derives what any being must be in order to be, how beings come to be and cease, and how far any account of the whole can reach. Then it meets reality where it is most concrete: number, matter, life.
Opens November 30, 2026 at 12:00 PM PT.
IIIEpistemologiaThe Limits of KnowingDec 15
How can anything know anything? The knower is one of the things it knows, and knows from inside. From one definition of knowing, the volume lets the old problems go: luck, the regress of reasons, the certainty of the thinking self. It finds what can be known, by whom, and when. The answer is narrower than hoped, and exact.
Opens December 15, 2026 at 12:00 PM PT.
Each volume is acquired once and kept: read without limit, every revision included.
de auctore
Aram Méndez has been asking one question, the oldest one, without the protection of a discipline around it. By trade he is a software engineer: he builds systems that must hold, exactly. Principia is what the question became.
Reality is one. Reach the ground of anything, and you stand on everything.— A.M.
Reality can be known. It is not a riddle set against us; it holds together completely, and the trouble humanity has had with it comes from looking at it in pieces: every why left standing, every science that stops at its own edge. From the right angle everything makes sense, and nothing is left over. The work is that angle.
praecursor
What Principia derives, Tension declares.