Topic
45 readings
A place to begin
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.
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?
All readings
45 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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?
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?
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Study this in sequence
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.