continental-critical-theory-sft

Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory SFT

A ~1,000-example supervised fine-tuning dataset of rigorous, expert-level Q&A on continental philosophy and critical theory, in chat messages format.

Dataset description

• Format: JSONL, one example per line, each a {"messages": [...]} chat object with system, user, and assistant roles — directly loadable by TRL's SFTTrainer, axolotl, or any trainer that accepts the OpenAI-style messages format.
• Size: 1,049 examples across 58 sharded files (data/batch-01.jsonl … data/batch-58.jsonl), 18 examples per batch except batch-01 (23).
• Language: English (key works referenced under original French/German titles).
• Authoring: hand-curated by a large language model working under tight factual constraints (specific works, names, dates, and debates named in each answer; no generic filler). Every batch was reviewed for format validity before upload.

Coverage

• Foundations: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), hermeneutics (Gadamer, Ricoeur).
• Critical theory: Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm), Habermas (communicative action, discourse ethics, deliberative democracy), Honneth (recognition, reification), Rosa, Han, Fisher, Bloch, Lukács, Jameson, Stuart Hall, Bourdieu.
• Structuralism and poststructuralism: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault (archaeology, discipline, biopower, governmentality, care of the self), Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Bataille, Blanchot, Bergson, Kojève and French Hegelianism, Simondon, Stiegler, Latour.
• Contemporary French theory: Badiou, Rancière, Žižek, Agamben, Esposito, Nancy, Debord and the Situationists, Lefebvre, Virilio.
• Feminism and queer theory: Beauvoir, Butler, Cixous, Irigaray, Firestone, Lorde, hooks, Rubin, Rich, Haraway, MacKinnon, care ethics, socialist feminism, queer theory.
• Postcolonial and decolonial: Said, Spivak, Bhabha, Fanon, Mbembe, Glissant, Mudimbe, Quijano, Mignolo, Wynter, Dussel, Santos, Smith.
• Critical race theory: Bell, Crenshaw, Mills, Du Bois, Harris, Delgado, whiteness studies.
• Political theory: Gramsci, Schmitt-adjacent debates (Agamben), Freire, Negri/Hardt and operaismo, Laclau-adjacent debates.
• French epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem, and the Comte–Poincaré–Meyerson lineage.

Intended use

Fine-tuning assistants to explain and critically engage with the continental tradition: definitions of concepts (e.g., différance, the spectacle, habitus, coloniality of power), reconstructions of arguments from specific books, comparisons of thinkers, surveys of debates and standard objections with replies, and biographical/contextual grounding.

Known caveats

• Answers are 100–140-word summaries intended for SFT; they compress dense material and should not be treated as scholarly citations.
• Some answers reference scholarship interpretations (e.g., the Du Bois–Hegel debate) that remain contested.
• A small number of examples include intentionally critical framings of their subjects; these reflect the tradition's own debates rather than endorsement.
• Sensitive topics (Nazism, fascism, colonial violence, the Holocaust) are treated analytically and critically, consistent with the tradition's own anti-totalitarian stance; no example endorses them.

Loading

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("closestfriend/continental-critical-theory-sft", split="train")
print(ds[0])

Provenance

Curated in October 2026. Batch contents and their commit history are preserved per file in data/. For questions or corrections, open an issue on this repo.