Topic
32 readings
A place to begin
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.
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.
All readings
32 readings · Title A–Z
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 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 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.
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 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?
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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?
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?
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 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.
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 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 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.
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”.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?