88 lessons · 14 modules
Guided course
Build connections across the world’s philosophies in 88 lessons, arranged in fourteen modules.
Read at your own pace
A guided course through the world’s philosophies.
Explore how people have understood reality, knowledge, meaning, and how to live.
Find your starting point
Take the broad route through philosophy, or choose a focused study of a thinker, text or question. Every route comes with guidance and suggested preparation, so you can start wherever your interests lead.
7 studies · 42 lessons
Focused studies
Spend more time with a thinker, text or question. Choose a study and follow its own sequence.
Choose a study →134 readings
Explore the readings
Find readings by topic, thinker or concept, and discover connections across the collection.
Free to read. No account needed. Save your place on this device if you choose.
More time with a question
Focused studies
Work closely with a text or follow an argument further.
1 lesson
A counterexample workshop
Test how far a claim reaches by finding a case in which it fails, and practice on general statements, inferences and fair repairs to an argument.
Course connections: Entering the conversation
Open this study1 lesson
Knowing oneself in Poimandres
How could knowing oneself transform a life, and what warrants trusting a teacher who promises salvation? Follow the teaching encounter in Poimandres and examine how the work connects knowledge with divine life.
Course connections: Reason, faith and translation · Responsibility in a shared world
Open this study2 lessons
Inference under challenge
What makes a sign a reason to believe something we cannot see? Follow selected Nyāya accounts and Dharmakīrti’s argument to examine the connection a sign needs, our grounds for relying on it and what a countercase can show.
Course connections: Inquiry and liberation in South Asia
Open this study9 lessons
Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world
An experience receives a world it did not make, yet becomes something that was not there before. How can both be true? Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality builds a philosophy around that difficulty, asking us to begin with occasions of becoming and to explain enduring things, perception, judgment and value through their relations.
Course connections: Meaning, experience and social criticism · Knowledge, justice and experience · Responsibility in a shared world
Open this study12 lessons
Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits
Begin with familiar encounters and follow Heidegger’s questions about being, a finite life, truth, art, dwelling and technology. Examine what the arguments explain, what they leave open and how they fare under political and ethical criticism.
Course connections: Meaning, experience and social criticism
Open this study9 lessons
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world
Follow Husserl and Merleau-Ponty from the appearance of a familiar thing to time, bodily skill, expression and other people. Test what their descriptions establish, where their methods differ and what still needs evidence or an ethical argument.
Course connections: Meaning, experience and social criticism
Open this study8 lessons
Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths
Follow Nāgārjuna’s arguments that nothing has an intrinsic nature of its own, from causes and motion to persons, the two truths and the charge that the argument undermines itself. Ask what the arguments leave standing: can things exist, change and matter without such a nature?
Course connections: Inquiry and liberation in South Asia
Open this studyWhat supports a claim to knowledge?
Knowing calls for more than feeling sure. Both readings ask what makes a belief well grounded, but they place different demands on justification, and setting them side by side is the course’s own comparison.
Learning to live well
Can practice make us more attentive to other people? The Analects and Aristotle both connect conduct with learning, though their concepts and settings differ. Compare what judgment does in a particular action before deciding how far the resemblance goes.
Who can question authority?
Being heard, choosing one’s work and sharing in interpretation raise different questions about power. Compare what each argument asks decision makers to change, without treating the social settings as interchangeable.