Reading guides

Follow a selected sequence of readings, with a reason for considering them together.

2 readings · Reading guide
Aristotle’s inquiries into nature and life
These readings follow Aristotle from explaining natural things to judging human activity. They introduce particular arguments in Greek philosophy, and they keep open the questions raised by his explanations and by the social arrangements he defends.
2 readings · Reading guide
Buddhist arguments about dependence and experience
Could anything have a nature entirely independent of conditions? Does an appearance establish the existence of an external object? The selections here take up these two questions through Madhyamaka and Yogācāra arguments. Interpreters disagree within each tradition and about how the two relate, and nothing here stands for all Buddhist thought.
1 reading · Reading guide
Doubt in Descartes’s Meditations
In the Meditations, Descartes joins an early modern European search for a secure basis for knowledge. His method of doubt serves a particular purpose; it is not a stage that every philosophy must pass through.
1 reading · Reading guide
Ibn Khaldun’s social inquiry
The Muqaddimah asks how political authority is established and maintained. The reading places this inquiry in Ibn Khaldun’s experience of North Africa and Muslim Spain, and keeps its religious setting in view.
2 readings · Reading guide
Knowledge and dependence in South Asian debates
Nyāya and Madhyamaka pursue different arguments about knowing and about what things depend on. The selections invite close comparison, but they do not add up to one account shared by South Asian traditions.
1 reading · Reading guide
Language and meaning
A word can name a tool, request it or help report where it is. This guide follows one change in Wittgenstein’s philosophical attention, from representation toward the variety of uses.
2 readings · Reading guide
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.
3 readings · Reading guide
Reading Egyptian instruction
Read selected advice from the Teaching of Ptahhotep with the limits of the surviving manuscript and of the translation in view. The later objects discussed in the maat article give a separate and limited religious context.
5 readings · Reading guide
Self and experience
An experience can be vivid while leaving its object in doubt. Vasubandhu tests an inference from appearances, and Descartes looks for what deliberate doubt cannot remove. Heidegger asks a different question, about the understanding already at work when we encounter a world; it is not another version of either argument.
2 readings · Reading guide
What 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.
6 readings · Reading guide
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.