Topic
51 readings
A place to begin
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.
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.
All readings
51 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 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?
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 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 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 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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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 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?
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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?
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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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?
Study this in sequence
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?