Topic
30 readings
Religion and liberation
Topic · 30 readings
How have people understood sacred claims and practices, and what would release from suffering mean?
A place to begin
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 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.
All readings
30 readings · Title A–Z
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 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 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 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 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 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 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?
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 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 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?
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 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?
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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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?
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.
Study this in sequence
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.
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.
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?