Topic
29 readings
A place to begin
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 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?
All readings
29 readings · Title A–Z
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?
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 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 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 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 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?
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 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 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 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?
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?
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 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?
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
Study this in sequence
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.