All readings

134 readings · Title A–Z

• Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 88

  A map you can keep revising

  The garden dispute from lesson 1 returns, now examined through Socratic questioning and public reason. The course ends by building a source-grounded comparison that records disagreement and stays open to revision.

• Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 69

  A self seen through a racial order

  Du Bois describes double consciousness, and Fanon the meanings a racial order imposes on a body. The lesson distinguishes their accounts and what each makes of the possibility of recognition.

• Guided course · Module 4 · Lesson 16

  Action without forcing

  The Daodejing questions fixed names and praises wuwei, acting without forcing. When does a ruler’s restraint give others room to act, and when does it become neglect or paternalism?

• Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 20

  An examined life in the city

  Plato’s Socrates questions Euthyphro’s confident account of piety. How can exposing inconsistent beliefs matter when the definition, and the portrait of the historical Socrates, remain unsettled?

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 5 of 12

  Anxiety and a life that can end

  Heidegger distinguishes anxiety from fear and treats death as a possibility that bears on how a life is lived. The lesson compares the readings of Blattner and Hoffman, questions the priority given to anxiety and asks for no personal disclosure.

• Reference article

  Argument: reasons and what they support

  An argument gives reasons for a conclusion; an explanation says why something is so. This article sets out that vocabulary and what validity does, and does not, tell us about truth.

• Guided course · Module 10 · Lesson 60

  Becoming an individual: two challenges to inherited values

  Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio confronts a faith he cannot explain away, and Nietzsche asks how moral judgments acquired their authority. The lesson preserves their differences over what commitment demands.

• Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 35

  Buddhist arguments in new languages and practices

  Fazang asks in what sense a rafter is the house, and Dōgen tells of a master who goes on fanning himself. Why do dependence and awakening make neither distinct things nor continued practice dispensable?

• Guided course · Module 10 · Lesson 56

  Can a moral rule bind everyone?

  Kant tests a false promise by universalizing its maxim, and describes autonomy as giving oneself a law. The lesson considers objections to treating universalization as a general decision procedure.

• Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 41

  Can a society explain its own changes?

  Ibn Khaldun explains how solidarity, asabiyya, can carry a group to power, and how success changes a ruler’s relationships. What evidence could support this explanation of political change?

• Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 71

  Can a tradition be reconstructed rather than preserved unchanged?

  Hu Shi and Liang Shuming disagree about how a tradition should be renewed and what science, democracy and inherited moral resources contribute. The lesson also separates a philosophical proposal from state policy.

• Guided course · Module 10 · Lesson 57

  Can freedom have a history?

  Hegel argues that freedom needs recognition and shared institutions, and that history advances toward freedom. The lesson examines those arguments and confronts the exclusions in his account of history.

• Guided course · Module 4 · Lesson 18

  Can institutions work without virtuous rulers?

  The Han Feizi proposes standards, offices and incentives that do not depend on a virtuous ruler. The lesson weighs the reliability they promise against what strict control can cost, and its checkpoint returns to the grain store where it began.

• Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 87

  Can people understand one another without sharing a final answer?

  Catholic teaching and British Quaker reflection give different accounts of sacramental life. The lesson keeps their disagreement real and distinguishes understanding a claim from endorsing it.

• Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 66

  Can reason become a tool of domination?

  Horkheimer and Adorno criticize a reason that asks only how efficiently an end is reached. The lesson questions an institution’s ends as well as its efficiency and tests its practice against its own promises.

• Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 83

  Can responsibility survive causal explanation?

  Hume, van Inwagen and Fischer disagree about the control that responsibility requires. The lesson separates three ideas their arguments rely on: causal determination, alternative possibilities and responsiveness to reasons.

• Guided course · Module 4 · Lesson 14

  Concern beyond one’s own circle

  The Mohists argue that partiality leads to conflict and that outsiders’ welfare must count, and they turn the argument against conquest. Concern for everyone, the lesson shows, need not mean identical affection or treatment.

• Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 36

  Debate, commentary and liberation in Tibet

  Tsongkhapa and Gorampa disagree about what emptiness denies. What does their disagreement mean for ordinary objects, and what remains disputed about conventional and ultimate understanding?

• Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 64

  Describe experience before explaining it away

  Husserl and Merleau-Ponty describe experience through three ideas: intentionality, bracketing and embodiment. How does a whole object appear through changing bodily perspectives?

• Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 42

  Destiny, character and interpretation in Yoruba thought

  A recorded Ifá poem and Segun Gbadegesin’s questions about destiny raise a problem about responsibility. How can choice, effort and character matter without making success or misfortune a measure of moral worth?

• Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 40

  Devotion, equality and religious practice

  Kabir and Guru Nanak criticize words and signs that stand in for devotion. How can communal practice express equality without proving that inequality has disappeared?

• Inference under challenge · Lesson 2 of 2

  Dharmakīrti: a reason that establishes its conclusion

  For Dharmakīrti, a reason must belong to its subject and be inseparable from what it establishes, and the connection must be known. The lesson compares his account with Nyāya’s, keeping apart what follows, what is known and what a countercase defeats.

• Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 12

  Does emptiness mean that nothing exists?

  Nāgārjuna replies to the objection that emptiness would make change impossible: intrinsic nature, he argues, is what would rule change out. Denying intrinsic nature leaves ordinary distinctions, actions and their consequences in place.

• Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 63

  Does language always work like a picture?

  Wittgenstein’s early account treats a sentence as a picture of a situation; his later work looks at words in use, where requests, reports and corrections do different jobs. The lesson connects meaning with use without concluding that words can mean anything.

• Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 8 of 8

  Does the argument undermine itself?

  If the claim that everything is empty is itself empty, can it refute anything? The lesson reads the Vigrahavyāvartanī’s dilemma and Nāgārjuna’s replies, compares three readings of “I do not have any thesis” and ends with the study’s final checkpoint.

• Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 65

  Freedom in a situation one did not choose

  Beauvoir’s account of situated freedom leads to questions about oppression and support. How can one person open another’s possibilities without directing their life?

• Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 70

  Freedom, caste and the terms of reform

  Ambedkar challenges caste, and Gandhi defends varna as a set of inherited duties. Can equal praise for those duties answer Ambedkar’s demand for freedom?

• Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 53

  Freedom, inequality and a common will

  Rousseau traces how inequality grows and argues that citizens could remain free as joint authors of the law. A majority’s victory, the lesson warns, is not the same as the general will.

• Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 75

  From the margin of an argument to its starting point

  Dussel, Quijano and Schutte ask how exclusion can change the starting point of an inquiry. The lesson applies the question to a policy review, without making any speaker or diagnosis immune to criticism.

• Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 51

  Habit, causation and the self

  Hume traces our expectations beyond observed cases to custom, and questions whether we ever perceive an unchanging self. His account of the self leaves a difficulty he kept open.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 4 of 12

  How a situation matters to us

  For Heidegger, attunement is a way of finding oneself in a situation, and care unites being ahead of oneself, being already in a world and being involved with beings. The lesson separates what a mood discloses from what it proves, and care from kindness.

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 3 of 9

  How can a passing moment belong to a whole?

  Husserl distinguishes retention of what has just passed from protention of what is coming, and both from recollection, which is another event. The lesson assesses what his description can establish about the unity of temporal experience.

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 1 of 9

  How can a philosophy answer to experience?

  Whitehead sets four demands on a speculative scheme: coherence, logical consistency, applicability and adequacy. The lesson separates an illuminating example from a reason to accept the scheme’s general claims.

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 7 of 9

  How can a possibility matter without being true?

  For Whitehead, a proposition can engage us whether or not it is true. The lesson compares affirmation, denial and suspended judgment without making usefulness the test of truth.

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 4 of 9

  How can another person be given to me?

  Husserl explains how another person is given through the lived body, pairing and appresentation. The lesson follows his account without treating another person’s experience as something one possesses or copies.

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 8 of 9

  How can occasions share space and time?

  Whitehead distinguishes genetic analysis, which follows an occasion’s becoming, from coordinate analysis, which divides its completed extent. What does that distinction explain about continuity, measurement and abstraction?

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 4 of 9

  How can something new arise from what is given?

  Whitehead distinguishes the conditions an occasion inherits, the pure possibilities it can draw on and the experience it achieves. Why does he invoke God’s valuation of possibilities, and what does the occasion’s self-determination leave unexplained?

• Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 32

  How can we speak about God?

  For Maimonides, divine unity rules out treating God as the bearer of distinct qualities; he teaches through negation and through descriptions of divine action. Scriptural language still needs careful interpretation.

• Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 9

  How can we tell whether we know?

  Nyāya counts perception, inference and testimony among the ways of coming to know, and sets out an inference in five steps. How can inquiry check its own instruments without demanding certainty in advance?

• Guided course · Module 4 · Lesson 15

  How do people become good?

  Mengzi finds moral beginnings in human nature, while Xunzi calls for its deliberate transformation. On either account education has work to do, and neither makes sustained effort unnecessary.

• Guided course · Module 1 · Lesson 3

  How do we know what earlier thinkers thought?

  Papyrus Prisse shows how a work’s setting, its composition and its surviving copy can belong to different times. What can such a witness, or a translation of it, establish about what people once thought?

• Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 77

  How does a scientific account earn trust?

  Popper asks what would count against a theory, and Kuhn describes normal science and its revolutions. Heather Douglas shows how weighing the costs of error differs from substituting values for evidence.

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 3 of 9

  How does the past enter a new experience?

  Whitehead describes how a new occasion takes in its past through prehension. The lesson separates the source of an inheritance from its contribution to a new feeling, and tests his account of selective causal reception.

• Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 48

  How far can doubt take us?

  Descartes moves from deliberate doubt to the certainty that he is thinking, a starting point the lesson keeps apart from his further claims about mind and body.

• Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 39

  How inherited ideas become new arguments

  Toegye and Yulgok debate how the Four Beginnings relate to the Seven Feelings, and what makes a feeling morally good. Itō Jinsai’s criticism of inherited vocabulary shows another way of transforming Confucian learning.

• Guided course · Module 10 · Lesson 59

  How much can well-being and liberty justify?

  Mill argues both for promoting well-being and for protecting liberty. How do the two arguments connect, and what do aggregation, harm and dissent require beyond a majority’s satisfaction?

• Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 45

  Human learning and the struggle over authority

  Erasmus and Luther disagree about textual authority, human choice and grace. What can a command in scripture establish about the ability to obey it?

• Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 50

  Ideas, experience and a material world

  Locke traces ideas to experience and distinguishes primary from secondary qualities; Berkeley challenges the material substance supposed to bear them. What does experience warrant about the objects we encounter?

• Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 7 of 8

  Is emptiness empty too?

  Is emptiness the true nature behind things, or is it empty too? The lesson follows the image of emptiness as a medicine that must leave the body with the illness, and explains how “neither empty nor non-empty” can be read without contradiction.

• Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 4 of 8

  Is the self its parts, or their owner?

  Is the self the changing body and mind, or something other than them? Nāgārjuna rejects both, models the person on fire and its fuel, and still refuses to conclude that there is no self.

• Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 22

  Justice in a person and a city

  Plato compares a just city with a well-ordered soul. Inner harmony might guide conduct, but order alone does not establish fair treatment of others.

• Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 38

  Knowing what is right and acting on it

  Zhu Xi calls for the investigation of things, and Wang Yangming ties genuine knowing to acting. How does understanding a duty relate to felt response, practice and a change in conduct?

• Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 21

  Knowledge, appearance and education

  Plato’s sun, line and cave distinguish correct belief from understanding and picture education as a turning around. What do these images explain, and what do they leave unproved about knowledge and authority?

• Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 76

  Land, knowledge and the right to continue a world

  Leanne Betasamosake Simpson connects living knowledge with land, responsibility and authority over learning. The module checkpoint asks who can take part in shaping an account, and what must change for that participation to matter.

• Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 44

  Law, relationship and collective responsibility

  The Onondaga Nation’s public account describes the duties of representatives, and Kahente Horn-Miller distinguishes consent from agreement. What makes deliberation answerable to the people it serves?

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 6 of 9

  Learning a way of moving

  Learning a skill, or adapting to a changed tool, can alter what a body is able to do. Following Merleau-Ponty on the body schema and habit, the lesson asks whether his account gives fluency too much authority.

• Guided course · Module 4 · Lesson 13

  Learning to become humane

  Selected passages of the Analects suggest how learning and ritual might form humane conduct. Why can a correct performance fail to express care, and how can such teachings preserve unequal authority?

• Guided course · Module 2 · Lesson 4

  Listening, power and the Teaching of Ptahhotep

  The Teaching of Ptahhotep urges a leader to hear a petitioner all the way through. Can listening restrain power while leaving the listener’s authority, and the inequality between them, in place?

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 7 of 12

  Living from a past toward a future

  Heidegger finds the unity of care in temporality and moves from inherited possibilities to a people’s destiny. What does that move leave ethically unjustified?

• Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 43

  Living well on an unstable earth

  A Nahua mother’s advice, preserved in the Florentine Codex, teaches balance on an unstable earth. How do colonial mediation, social hierarchy and living interpreters qualify what her discourse can establish?

• Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 62

  Logic, meaning and a new ideal of clarity

  Frege distinguishes an expression’s sense from its reference to explain how an identity can be informative. The lesson also shows why substituting one name for another can change what a belief report says.

• Reference article

  Maat: right order in a religious setting

  Two museum descriptions connect maat with order, truth and justice. The article keeps their different periods in view, along with the uncertain identification of one object.

• Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 10

  Mind, discipline and freedom

  Sāṃkhya and Yoga both distinguish consciousness from the changing mind. If liberation does not consist in improving that witnessing consciousness, what can mental discipline change?

• Guided course · Module 2 · Lesson 5

  Mortality and the limits of achievement

  Grief sends Gilgamesh in search of a way past death, and he returns to Uruk without one. Do mortal limits make achievement worthless, or change what we can reasonably ask of a human life?

• Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 8

  Nonviolence and partial perspectives

  Jain teaching connects nonviolence with the living beings around us and with karmic bondage. Its idea of partial standpoints raises a further question: how can a partial view reveal something true without making every opinion equally sound?

• Inference under challenge · Lesson 1 of 2

  Nyāya: what warrants an inference?

  Setting out a Nyāya inference in five parts does not establish its warrant: the sign must be connected to what it proves, in the right direction. A countercase can expose an additional condition without showing that the conclusion is false.

• Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 49

  One nature or many substances?

  Spinoza argues for one substance, God or Nature, and Leibniz for many monads. For Spinoza, understanding might increase freedom within a necessary order.

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 1 of 9

  One thing, more than one appearance

  Husserl distinguishes an object from its changing appearances, and an act of experience from its intentional correlate. Intentionality, the lesson shows, needs neither an inner picture nor an infallible report, and leaves room for error and correction.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 3 of 12

  Other people and the way one does things

  Even work done alone can be shaped by being-with and by the everyday authority Heidegger calls the they. The lesson separates shared norms from conformity and asks how help can support or displace another person’s agency.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 8 of 12

  Philosophy under political judgment

  Heidegger’s political commitments put his philosophy under judgment. The lesson separates established evidence from reported notebook passages, compares Di Cesare’s and Malpas’s readings and judges claims without exempting the work from its history.

• Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 25

  Pleasure, virtue and what is up to us

  Epicurus teaches how to choose among pleasures; Epictetus separates what is up to us, our judgments, from results that are not. Similar practical advice, the lesson shows, can rest on different views of what makes a life good.

• Knowing oneself in Poimandres · Lesson 1 of 1

  Poimandres: knowing oneself and trusting a teacher

  The teaching in Poimandres links self-recognition to salvation. The lesson keeps the authority of this teaching story apart from historical interpretation and from independent support for the claims it makes.

• Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 73

  Reason, tradition and renewal in modern Muslim thought

  Iqbal proposes renewing legal interpretation through ijtihad and collective deliberation, and Hallaq challenges a simple history in which interpretation was closed. How much freedom does such renewal allow?

• Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 33

  Reasoning across faith and nature

  Aquinas answers a question by setting out objections, giving his answer and replying to each. The lesson follows one such question, then examines the limits of proof from effects and the place of practical reasoning in natural law.

• Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 37

  Self and ultimate reality: two Vedānta accounts

  Śaṅkara and Rāmānuja read the same scriptural words about self and brahman in different ways, and give different accounts of unity, difference and the knowledge that liberates.

• Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 72

  Self, world and nothingness in modern Japan

  Nishida’s accounts of pure experience, place and absolute nothingness change over time. The lesson compares them with the earlier Buddhist idea of emptiness and examines the political implications proposed for his metaphysics.

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 8 of 9

  Sharing a world without sharing one perspective

  Merleau-Ponty describes meeting others in a shared bodily and cultural world, and the lesson compares his account with Husserl’s. Sharing an object or an exchange, it shows, is not the same as sharing access, agreement or justified belief.

• Reference article

  Sources and interpretation

  A source can answer one question well and another hardly at all. This article keeps the date a work was composed apart from the date of its surviving witness, and separates historical influence from sequence and comparison.

• Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 7

  Suffering, impermanence and not-self

  Early Buddhist discourses challenge the hope of finding a secure self in changing experience, and do so for the sake of liberation. Not-self, the lesson shows, is not the claim that nothing exists.

• A counterexample workshop · Lesson 1 of 1

  Testing a claim with a counterexample

  A counterexample can test a general claim, or test an inference by describing a case in which its premises are true and its conclusion false. The workshop practices both, then asks what a fair repair of an argument should preserve.

• Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 47

  Testing inherited authority in Ethiopia

  The Hatata gives religious reasons for testing inherited belief. Its unresolved authorship is a separate question from the strength of its reasoning.

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 5 of 9

  The body through which a world appears

  Merleau-Ponty criticizes the picture of a mechanical body supplemented by an inner observer, and describes the lived body as access to a world. The lesson keeps the value of physical description and asks what reflection from within a situation can establish.

• Reference article

  The Teaching of Ptahhotep: a reading guide

  This guide locates the passages of the Teaching of Ptahhotep read in lesson 4 and sets out their attributed setting, their surviving witness and the limits of the translation.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 2 of 12

  The world in a familiar tool

  A tool belongs with materials, a task and a way of living, and a broken or missing tool can reveal those connections. The lesson asks whether practical involvement comes before detached observation.

• Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 28

  Time, will and the inward turn

  Augustine examines a divided will and asks where the time we measure could be. Habit, memory, attention and expectation shape his answers; how far can an inward inquiry explain what it finds?

• Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 29

  Translation as philosophical creation

  Hunayn ibn Ishaq revises a translation, and al-Kindi defends the pursuit of philosophy. The lesson shows how translation transforms an inheritance and asks what evidence separates real reception from a resemblance later readers notice.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 9 of 12

  Truth before a true statement?

  For Heidegger, a statement can be correct only where something has already been disclosed. Setting a defense by Wrathall beside an objection from Lafont, the lesson asks how a framework of understanding can itself answer to criticism.

• Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 67

  Understanding is not reading without assumptions

  Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle moves between part and whole, and between a text and its reader’s assumptions. A changing interpretation shows how a text can correct what a reader brings to it.

• Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 27

  Unity, intellect and the life of the soul

  Plotinus argues from the multiplicity of things to the One, a first principle beyond Intellect. The lesson asks how Intellect, Soul and the soul’s return fit together, and why an experience of unity does not by itself prove the explanation.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 1 of 12

  What are we asking when we ask about being?

  Heidegger distinguishes beings from their being and begins with Dasein and its being-in-the-world. The lesson reconstructs his reasons and weighs an objection to the priority he claims.

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 2 of 9

  What becomes actual?

  Whitehead begins with occasions of becoming rather than enduring things, and treats even nonconscious actuality as experiential. What does he gain by doing so, and what does he still owe?

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 9 of 9

  What can a description establish?

  The final lesson of the study separates description, constitutive argument, causal explanation and ethical judgment, and weighs Husserl and Merleau-Ponty against their critics. Its checkpoint asks what an exhibition committee should do next.

• Guided course · Module 4 · Lesson 17

  What can a perspective leave out?

  The Zhuangzi sets a dispute that no victory can settle beside a butcher who knows when to slow down. Limited perspectives, the lesson argues, still leave room for better reasons, closer attention and more responsive action.

• Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 81

  What can art disclose that an argument may not?

  Kant separates aesthetic judgment from private liking, and Tagore asks what a copied style loses. What do rhythm, sequence and silence contribute beyond a work’s paraphrased message?

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 9 of 9

  What can last in a world that perishes?

  Whitehead holds that the past goes on having effects and proposes that God preserves what the world achieves. The lesson tests what either claim establishes about personal survival and suffering, and ends the study with a cumulative checkpoint.

• Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 31

  What can reason establish about causation?

  Al-Ghazali challenges causal necessity, and Averroes defends the natural powers of things. What does observation establish, and how does each account explain regularity, conditions and possible exceptions?

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 2 of 9

  What changes when we bracket the world?

  Husserl brackets the ordinary acceptance of the world and varies examples in imagination to find what cannot change. What could warrant the move from an apparent invariant to a necessity?

• Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 6

  What could it mean to know the self?

  Maitreyī asks what wealth can promise, and the answer she hears turns to knowing the knower. What does this Upanishadic account of the self explain, and what does it leave hard to understand?

• Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 23

  What counts as explaining something?

  Aristotle’s four causes answer different questions about one thing. A cup and a growing plant test what matter, form and an end can explain, including an end that no one consciously intends.

• Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 61

  What difference would an idea make in practice?

  Peirce and James tie meaning and truth to practical consequences. How can consequences clarify a claim without making comfort the test of truth?

• Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 80

  What disappears when dependency is treated as an exception?

  Kittay argues that dependency and care belong in an account of justice, and Crenshaw shows what analyzing race or sex alone can miss. A shared case tests which support and which inequalities each account brings into view.

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 6 of 9

  What do we encounter when we perceive?

  Whitehead separates presentational immediacy, a thing’s clear appearance, from causal efficacy, its felt influence, and joins them through symbolic reference. How does that joining make perception useful, and how can it mislead?

• Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 84

  What do we owe beyond the present human world?

  Leopold, Rawls and Simpson give different reasons for obligations to land, to future generations and within particular relationships. The lesson keeps present needs, and the question of who has authority to decide, in view.

• Guided course · Module 1 · Lesson 2

  What does a reason actually support?

  Whether a conclusion follows is one question, and whether the premises are true is another; imagining true premises with a false conclusion tests whether it follows. Reasons can still support a conclusion they do not guarantee.

• Guided course · Module 10 · Lesson 58

  What does a social system make of a person?

  Marx’s accounts of alienation, commodity fetishism and ideology each describe social relations of work and exchange. The lesson distinguishes the three and separates a structural relation from a personal attitude.

• Guided course · Module 7 · Lesson 34

  What does experience tell us about the world?

  Vasubandhu uses dreams to ask what appearances establish, and store consciousness to explain continuity without a permanent owner. Rival interpretations of representation and external objects stay open.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 11 of 12

  What does it mean to dwell?

  Heidegger describes how a bridge gathers a place, and Julian Young interprets his idea of dwelling. Why does neither a place’s meaning nor its power to gather people decide who should have access to it?

• Guided course · Module 3 · Lesson 11

  What gives a sacred text authority?

  Mīmāṃsā defends the authority of the Veda’s injunctions; Vedānta asks what its words teach about brahman. Accepting scriptural authority still leaves meaning, knowledge and action to be argued about.

• Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 26

  What if inquiry does not settle the dispute?

  Sextus Empiricus gives reasons for suspending judgment while inquiry continues, and shows how a skeptic can still act. His challenge is set beside Plato’s search for a starting point that rests on no assumption.

• Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 6 of 8

  What is left of the two truths?

  Once no ultimately real elements remain, what do conventional and ultimate truth mean? The lesson compares three readings of ultimate truth and asks whether conventional claims can still be right or wrong.

• Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 2 of 8

  What makes a condition a cause?

  Nāgārjuna examines the four ways something might be thought to arise and argues that nothing with intrinsic nature could be produced. The lesson names the assumptions the argument relies on and compares two readings of causal connection.

• Guided course · Module 1 · Lesson 1

  What makes a question philosophical?

  A dispute at a garden gate mixes factual, conceptual and normative questions. Neither general agreement nor a single example settles whether the rule is fair.

• Guided course · Module 10 · Lesson 55

  What must experience already involve?

  Kant asks what conditions any objective experience must meet. The lesson separates those conditions from knowledge of particular causes and from things considered in themselves.

• Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 19

  What stays the same when things change?

  Heraclitus finds order in change, and Parmenides asks whether being could ever begin. Their surviving words are kept apart from the later reports that frame how they are read.

• Guided course · Module 5 · Lesson 24

  What would a flourishing life require?

  Aristotle describes flourishing as a whole life shaped by habit, practical judgment and friendship. How do external conditions and political exclusions complicate that picture?

• Guided course · Module 6 · Lesson 30

  What would a necessary being be?

  Avicenna separates what a thing is from whether it exists, and argues that explaining contingent things may require a being necessary in itself. How far does that conclusion reach?

• Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 82

  What would explain conscious experience?

  Does Mary learn something new when she first sees color? Jackson argues that she learns what the experience is like; Lewis’s ability hypothesis questions whether that is a new fact, and Chalmers separates explaining functions from explaining experience.

• Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 79

  What would fair institutions have to protect?

  Rawls, Nozick and Sen offer different tests of fair institutions: principles chosen behind a veil of ignorance, the history of holdings and what people can actually do. Each challenges a simple comparison of incomes.

• Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 1 of 8

  What would it mean to exist on one’s own?

  Nāgārjuna argues that nothing has intrinsic nature, a nature it would have independently of everything else. The lesson states the Abhidharma view he opposes as a serious theory, then reads chapter 15’s middle path between “it exists” and “it does not exist”.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 6 of 12

  What would it mean to own a life?

  For Heidegger, taking over a life involves existential guilt, the call of conscience and resoluteness. The lesson separates owning a commitment from justifying it, and keeps room for dependence, assistance and correction.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 10 of 12

  When art opens a world

  In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger describes a temple that opens a world, where world and earth stand in strife. The lesson also compares his accounts of language and shows why shared meanings still leave factual and ethical questions to be answered.

• Heidegger: being, a shared world and its limits · Lesson 12 of 12

  When everything becomes a resource

  Heidegger asks what technology is in its essence: a way of revealing things as standing-reserve, held ready for ordering. The study ends with a three-task checkpoint on a library decision.

• Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: experience, embodiment and a shared world · Lesson 7 of 9

  When expression helps a thought take shape

  Merleau-Ponty argues that expression can accomplish a thought rather than record a meaning already complete. The lesson distinguishes acquired language from emerging meaning, and both from truth.

• Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 3 of 8

  Where does the going happen?

  Going cannot be found on the path already traversed, the path not yet traversed or the path being traversed, Nāgārjuna argues. The lesson compares two readings of the argument and explains why “ultimately, there is no going” does not say that nothing moves.

• Nāgārjuna: emptiness, dependence and the two truths · Lesson 5 of 8

  Who acts, and who answers for it?

  If agent and action lack intrinsic nature, can anyone answer for what they do? The lesson follows chapter 17 on action and its results and weighs the charge that Madhyamaka is a form of nihilism.

• Guided course · Module 13 · Lesson 78

  Who is heard, and who is treated as credible?

  Fricker separates prejudice against a speaker from gaps in shared understanding and proposes remedies; Harding argues for changing where inquiry begins. The lesson adds that a starting point still needs testing.

• Guided course · Module 8 · Lesson 46

  Who is recognized as fully human?

  At Valladolid, Sepúlveda’s justifications for conquest met Las Casas’s replies. Writing later in Peru, Guaman Poma challenges the terms of such debates by asking who may instruct a colonial ruler.

• Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 85

  Who is responsible when a decision is automated?

  When a ranking system decides who gets a training place, who must answer for the decision? With Binns and Nissenbaum, the lesson asks what prediction, explanation and human review leave unresolved about justification and repair.

• Guided course · Module 12 · Lesson 74

  Who is speaking when a philosophy is called communal?

  Gyekye and Wiredu offer their own argued interpretations of Akan personhood. Hountondji criticizes the assumption that a whole people speaks with one voice, and Oruka investigates individual reasoning in oral dialogue.

• Guided course · Module 11 · Lesson 68

  Who makes the categories by which we live?

  Foucault describes productive power, which shapes categories and knowledge; Derrida brings a different question about meaning. What do an institution’s assessments reveal, and what do they help to create?

• Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 54

  Who was left outside the language of rights?

  Wollstonecraft and Cugoano challenge the exclusion of women and of enslaved people from equal liberty. What do their arguments demand of education, ownership and public institutions?

• Guided course · Module 14 · Lesson 86

  Whose capacities set the terms of moral standing?

  Taylor, Singer and Regan disagree about whose interests count. The lesson tests thresholds of capacity for moral standing and keeps the differences between disability criticism and animal ethics in view.

• Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 5 of 9

  Why do things endure?

  For Whitehead, a society of occasions is held together by inherited order, not by resemblance alone. Do such societies explain the endurance of familiar things, or only assume it?

• Guided course · Module 9 · Lesson 52

  Why should anyone obey a government?

  Hobbes and Locke disagree about the grounds and limits of political authority. A shared case tests their accounts of protection, consent, rights and resistance.