ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
The man who claimed to know nothing and changed the world. How asking the right questions became the most powerful tool in human thought.
Do you actually choose anything, or are your choices the inevitable result of atoms, neurons, and prior causes? The debate that has no easy answer.
Prisoners chained in a cave, watching shadows on a wall and mistaking them for reality. The most famous thought experiment ever written.
Aristotle argued the goal of life is eudaimonia — flourishing. Virtue is a habit, found in the mean between extremes. Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness. His ethics still dominate moral philosophy.
Focus only on what you can control. Accept what you cannot. The Stoics — a Roman emperor, a freed slave, and a playwright — developed a philosophy of resilience that Silicon Valley rediscovered 2,000 years later.
KNOWLEDGE & REALITY
Descartes doubted everything — including his own senses and the existence of the physical world. The one thing he couldn't doubt: that he was doing the doubting. From that single certainty, he rebuilt all of philosophy.
Plato defined knowledge as "justified true belief" — but Edmund Gettier showed in 1963 that this is wrong. What separates knowledge from mere lucky guessing? Epistemology is the search for that answer.
How does 1.5 kg of grey matter produce the experience of seeing red, feeling love, or understanding a joke? The mind-body problem has defeated every philosopher who has tried it — and neuroscience hasn't solved it either.
Nick Bostrom's simulation argument: if it's possible to simulate conscious minds, and civilisations tend to run many simulations, then almost certainly we are inside one. Elon Musk thinks it's probably true.
Is time a river that flows, or a block in which past, present, and future all equally exist? Augustine said "what is time? If no one asks, I know. If I try to explain, I don't." Physics and philosophy still disagree.
ETHICS & MORALITY
A runaway trolley is heading for five people. You can divert it to kill one. Should you? Three great ethical frameworks give three different answers — and none is obviously correct.
The right action is the one that produces the most happiness for the most people. Simple, powerful, and deeply troubling — because it can justify sacrificing the few for the many.
Act only according to rules you'd want everyone to follow. Never treat people merely as means to an end. Kant's categorical imperative is the most rigorous attempt to ground morality in pure reason.
Is torturing children wrong in an absolute, mind-independent sense — or just something most cultures happen to disapprove of? Moral realism vs relativism is the deepest question in ethics.
Peter Singer argued that the capacity to suffer — not intelligence or species membership — is what grants moral consideration. If that's right, our treatment of animals is the greatest moral catastrophe of our time.
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Why should anyone obey the government? Hobbes said because without it life is "nasty, brutish, and short." Locke said governments derive legitimacy from consent. Their disagreement created modern politics.
John Rawls asked: what rules would you choose if you didn't know what position you'd occupy in society — rich or poor, majority or minority? His "veil of ignorance" is the most powerful thought experiment in political philosophy.
John Stuart Mill argued you should be free to do anything that doesn't harm others. But where does your freedom end and harm to others begin? Every debate about drugs, speech, and government control rests on this question.
Plato hated democracy — he thought most people were too ignorant to govern. Churchill called it "the worst form of government, except for all the others." What are democracy's genuine weaknesses — and how do we fix them?
Machiavelli said rulers must be willing to be feared rather than loved. Foucault argued power is everywhere — in language, institutions, and knowledge itself. Understanding power is understanding the world.
EXISTENTIALISM & MEANING
Life has no inherent meaning — so you must create your own. The philosophy born from two world wars that still defines how millions live today. "Existence precedes essence."
"God is dead — and we have killed him." Nietzsche wasn't celebrating; he was warning that without divine moral grounding, nihilism threatens. His answer: create new values. His influence on the 20th century was immense and often terrifying.
Sisyphus rolls a boulder uphill forever — and Camus says we must imagine him happy. The absurd is the clash between our desire for meaning and the universe's silence. Camus' answer: revolt, freedom, passion.
Hedonism says pleasure. Aristotle says flourishing. Existentialists say you decide. Religious traditions say devotion. Even "42" (Douglas Adams). Philosophy hasn't agreed — but the search itself may be the point.
Epicurus argued death cannot harm you — because when death arrives, you no longer exist to be harmed. Every major philosophy has had to confront mortality. How you face death shapes how you live.
LOGIC & LANGUAGE
Ad hominem, straw man, slippery slope — the tricks people use to win arguments without being right. Learn to spot every logical fallacy and never be fooled again.
Wittgenstein said "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." Can we have a thought we can't express in words? Philosophy of language asks what meaning is and how words connect to the world.
Achilles can never overtake a tortoise (Zeno). "This statement is false" (The Liar Paradox). If you replace every plank of a ship, is it still the same ship? Paradoxes reveal the cracks in our most basic concepts.
Karl Popper argued a theory is only scientific if it can be falsified. Thomas Kuhn showed science doesn't progress smoothly but through revolutions. What separates science from pseudoscience?
Thought experiments are philosophy's lab equipment. Mary the colour scientist knows everything about red but has never seen it — when she does, does she learn something new? Frank Jackson's thought experiment changed consciousness studies.
EASTERN PHILOSOPHY
Confucius taught that society is harmonious when everyone fulfils their role with virtue and respect. His ideas shaped Chinese culture, governance, and education for 2,500 years — and still do.
Buddhism argues there is no fixed self — the "you" that seems permanent is a constantly changing stream of experiences. Suffering arises from attachment to what is impermanent. The solution: let go.
The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. Laozi's Tao Te Ching teaches effortless action, harmony with nature, and the wisdom of not forcing things. Its influence runs from Chinese painting to quantum physics.
THE BIG QUESTIONS
The ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the fine-tuning argument — and the problem of evil. Philosophy of religion examines the most consequential question humans have ever asked.
Can a computer ever truly think — or just simulate thinking? John Searle's Chinese Room argument says no. Alan Turing's test says yes if you can't tell the difference. As AI advances, this debate becomes urgent.
Are you the same person you were at age 5? Every atom in your body has been replaced. Your beliefs have changed. What makes you "you" across time? Locke, Hume, and Parfit gave three very different answers.
Leibniz called it the fundamental question of metaphysics. Why does anything exist at all? Why not just emptiness? Every answer — God, the multiverse, chance — raises deeper questions than it answers.
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder — or is there objective beauty? What makes a urinal signed by Marcel Duchamp "art" while an identical unsigned urinal isn't? Philosophy of art has no easy answers and brilliant questions.
Is a happy life just a life of pleasure? Or does happiness require meaning, virtue, and growth? From ancient hedonism to Robert Nozick's "experience machine" — the philosophy of what a good life actually is.
Philosophy graduates outperform all other disciplines on GMAT and LSAT tests. Philosophy teaches clarity of thought, identification of assumptions, and construction of arguments — the skills that matter in every field.
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Descartes split reality into mind (thinking, non-extended substance) and body (extended, non-thinking matter) — creating the classic mind-body problem: how do two entirely different substances causally interact?
David Chalmers distinguished the 'easy problems' of consciousness (explaining how the brain processes information, discriminates stimuli, integrates information) from the 'hard problem':
Qualia are the subjective, felt qualities of experience — the redness of red, the painfulness of pain, the specific taste of wine.
Functionalism: mental states are defined by their functional role (causal relations between inputs, outputs, and other mental states) not their physical constitution.
Type identity theory (Place, Smart): each mental state type is identical to a brain state type. Token identity theory (Davidson):
Compatibilism: free will is compatible with determinism — free choice means acting from one's own desires and reasons without coercion, even if those desires are causally determined.
What makes you the same person you were ten years ago, given that your cells, beliefs, memories, and personality have all changed?
How do you know other people are conscious rather than philosophical zombies (physically identical to conscious beings but with no inner experience)?
Brentano observed that mental states have intentionality — they are directed toward or about something (beliefs are about states of affairs, desires about outcomes, fears about dangers).
Naive realism (direct realism): in perception you are directly aware of the physical world as it is. Representative realism (indirect realism, Locke):
How do words mean? Referential theories: names refer directly to objects. Descriptivist theories: names are shorthand for descriptions.
James-Lange theory: emotions ARE the perception of bodily changes (you're afraid because you run, not vice versa). Cognitive appraisal theory (Lazarus): emotions involve appraisal of significance to one's goals.
Turing Test (Turing 1950): if a machine responds indistinguishably from a human in text conversation, it thinks.
Do animals have beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions? Behaviourism denied it; cognitive ethology affirms rich inner lives across many species.
Imagination as faculty: Kant's 'productive imagination' synthesises experience into coherent perception. Imagination as simulation: mental imagery reuses perceptual systems to simulate absent situations.
Henri Bergson: memory is not stored recordings but dynamic, active reconstruction. The specious present: what we experience as 'now' spans a brief temporal window (~2-3 seconds)
Western philosophy tends to assume a persistent, unified self as the subject of experience. Buddhist philosophy (anatman/anatta) denies the existence of a fixed, separate self
Against the computational view of mind as abstract software running on biological hardware, phenomenologists (Merleau-Ponty) and embodied cognition theorists argue that mind is constituted by bodily engagement with the environment.
Clark and Chalmers (1998): if a notebook plays the same functional role for Otto's beliefs as memory plays for Inga's, Otto's notebook IS part of his mind.
What is the relationship between dreaming and waking experience? Descartes used dreaming to motivate radical doubt.
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Demarcation problem (Popper): science is distinguished from non-science by falsifiability — scientific theories must make predictions that could be false in principle. Psychoanalysis and Marxism were unfalsifiable, hence pseudoscientific.
Hume's problem: no matter how many white swans we observe, we cannot logically prove all swans are white — the next could be black.
Scientific realism: successful scientific theories are approximately true descriptions of (including unobservable) reality. The no-miracles argument: the predictive success of science would be a miracle if theories weren't approximately true.
The Duhem-Quine thesis: no hypothesis can be tested in isolation — it is tested together with auxiliary hypotheses (background assumptions, instrument calibrations).
What is causation? Hume: cause and effect are merely constant conjunction (A is followed by B) plus habitual expectation — there is no necessity in nature observed by the senses.
Covering-law model (Hempel): an event is explained by showing it was to be expected given laws and initial conditions (deductive-nomological). Statistical-probabilistic explanations increase the probability of the explanandum.
Can the special sciences (biology, psychology, economics) be reduced to physics? Strong reductionism: all phenomena are reducible in principle to fundamental physics.
What is a species? Biological species concept (Mayr): populations reproductively isolated. Phylogenetic species concept: smallest monophyletic group.
What does quantum mechanics tell us about reality? Copenhagen interpretation: the wave function 'collapses' on measurement — quantum states are actually observed facts, not real prior to observation.
Newton: absolute space and time exist independently of objects and events. Leibniz: space and time are merely relations between objects — there is no absolute location or duration.
What are mathematical objects? Platonism: numbers and geometric forms exist independently of minds in an abstract realm. Formalism (Hilbert): mathematics is a formal symbol game — consistency is all that matters.
What is probability? Frequentist: probability is the long-run relative frequency of outcomes. Subjective Bayesian: probability is a rational agent's degree of belief, updated by Bayes' theorem.
Are laws of nature metaphysically fundamental regularities (Humean regularity theory: laws are just patterns in the universe, nothing more), or do they express necessities between universals (Armstrong:
Is science value-free? Hempel's ideal: science describes, not prescribes — values are out of place. But theory choice criteria (simplicity, parsimony, explanatory power) are themselves values.
What counts as disease vs normal variation? Biostatistical theory (Boorse): disease is deviation from species-typical functioning. Normativist theory (Nordenfelt): disease involves failure to achieve vital goals.
Can AI systems understand, or only simulate understanding? (Searle's Chinese Room). What would artificial general intelligence (AGI) mean? If a sufficiently intelligent AI emerges, will it have interests, rights, consciousness?
Does nature have intrinsic value (independent of human valuation) or only instrumental value? Deep ecology (Naess): all living beings have equal intrinsic value.
Methodological individualism (Weber, Popper): social phenomena should be explained in terms of individuals and their actions. Holism: society has properties irreducible to individuals
Instrumentalism: technology is neutral — it is merely a means to ends chosen by humans. Heidegger's critique: modern technology frames everything (including humans) as 'standing reserve' — resources available for optimisation.
What are economic models? Are they approximately true, or useful fictions? Homo economicus (rational, self-interested actor maximising utility) is descriptively false — but does that matter for economic explanation and prediction?
METAPHYSICS
Heidegger's fundamental question: 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' Ontology asks what kinds of things exist (substances, properties, relations, facts, events).
Aristotle's categories: substance (what things are) vs. properties (how things are). Primary substances are particular things (Socrates); secondary substances are kinds (human being).
A-series (McTaggart): events are past, present, or future — these are intrinsic, changing properties (temporal becoming is real).
What does it mean to say something is necessarily true (true in all possible worlds) or possibly true (true in some possible world)?
Dispositionalism: properties are essentially powers — dispositional properties like fragility, solubility, and gravitational attraction are fundamental to nature. Reality is constituted by powerful properties in mutual manifestation.
Do numbers, sets, propositions, and Platonic forms exist independently of minds and physical objects? Platonism (mathematical realism): abstract objects exist necessarily, outside space and time
Correspondence theory: truth is correspondence between propositions and facts in the world. Coherence theory: truth is coherence within a system of beliefs.
The problem of universals: when we say two roses are both red, are we referring to a single entity (the universal redness) shared by different particulars?
When does a collection of parts compose a whole? Nihilism (van Inwagen): only simples (partless particles) and organisms compose objects.
Where are you? Absolutism (Newton): space is a fixed container — objects have absolute locations within it. Relationalism (Leibniz): space is only relations between objects; 'absolute space' is incoherent.
Aristotle distinguished essential properties (without which a thing could not be what it is — humans are essentially rational animals) from accidental properties (which a thing could lack while remaining the same...
How can things change while remaining the same thing? Heraclitus: you cannot step in the same river twice — flux is fundamental.
Classical physics suggested a deterministic universe — Laplace's demon: a sufficiently intelligent being knowing the state of every particle could calculate the entire future.
When does the matter composing an object constitute that object? Van Inwagen's Special Composition Question: under what conditions do things compose something?
What are the natural numbers — 0, 1, 2, 3...? Frege defined 0 as the extension of the concept 'not identical to itself' — an empty class.
Metaphysical realism: there is a mind-independent world with a determinate structure. Anti-realism: the world is somehow mind-dependent
Berkeley's subjective idealism: to exist is to be perceived — material objects are collections of ideas in minds. Without perception, objects cease to exist.
Metaphysical nihilism: it is possible that nothing at all exists — even the most minimal ontology might be wrong.
Mathematical structuralism (Shapiro, Resnik): mathematics studies structures — abstract patterns that can be variously instantiated. The natural number structure can be realised by sets, by positions, by any ω-sequence.
What is nothing? The void, the vacuum, non-existence. Parmenides: non-being cannot exist or even be thought. Hegel's dialectic begins with pure Being — which is indistinguishable from pure Nothing
EPISTEMOLOGY
Plato's definition: knowledge is justified true belief. Edmund Gettier (1963) showed this is wrong in three pages that transformed epistemology:
Pyrrhonian sceptics suspended judgment on all non-evident matters — achieving tranquility through the equipollence of arguments.
Foundationalism: knowledge has a hierarchical structure — basic beliefs (immediate sense experience, cogito) serve as foundations that justify all other beliefs without themselves requiring further justification.
A priori knowledge: knowable independently of experience, through reason alone — logic, mathematics, analytic truths. A posteriori knowledge: knowable only through experience — scientific facts, contingent truths.
Goldman's reliabilism: a belief constitutes knowledge if it is formed by a reliable process — a process that tends to produce true beliefs.
Sosa and Zagzebski: knowledge involves intellectual virtue — stable dispositions for good epistemic practices such as intellectual humility, open-mindedness, thoroughness, and intellectual courage. These virtues are the source of epistemic responsibility.
Individual epistemology asks what one person can know. Social epistemology (Goldman, Fricker) asks: how does knowledge (and ignorance) spread and get produced in social groups?
Can we know things on the basis of what others tell us? Reductionism (Hume): testimony is reliable only when confirmed by our own experience — we cannot trust testimony directly.
What should you do when you encounter a peer who disagrees with you (given equal evidence and competence)? Conciliationism: you should move toward each other's views — split the difference.
Are memory beliefs justified? Direct realism about memory: memory gives direct access to past events. Causal-trace theory: current memories are connected via causal chains to past experiences.
How does perception yield knowledge? Sense data theories: we are directly aware of sense data (private mental images) which represent the external world.
How do we know our own minds? Privileged access: we have special, first-person access to our mental states unavailable to others.
IBE or abduction: infer the hypothesis that best explains the available evidence. Peirce: abductive inference generates hypotheses for testing.
Bayesianism: rational agents have degrees of belief (credences) representable as probabilities satisfying the probability axioms. Conditionalization: update credences on new evidence by Bayes' theorem.
Internalist epistemology: what justifies beliefs is entirely internal to the believer — accessible features like evidence, reasoning ability, introspectively available processes.
Peirce: the meaning of an idea is its practical consequences — the sum of all its effects. Truth is what inquiry converges on in the long run.
Feminist epistemology critiques the image of the ideal knower as single, detached, context-free, and view-from-nowhere. Situated knowledge (Haraway): all knowledge is produced from a particular social location
Global scepticism denies that we know anything (or almost anything). Local scepticism targets specific domains: we might be sceptics about morality (error theory), about other minds, about the future, or about testimony....
Quine: epistemology should be naturalised — it is a chapter of cognitive science describing how humans achieve scientific knowledge rather than seeking a priori justificatory foundations.
Can religious belief be rational? Classical evidentialism: belief is rational only if well-evidenced. Plantinga's reformed epistemology: belief in God is properly basic — no argument needed, like perceptual and memory beliefs.
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY
Frege: the sense (Sinn) of a sentence determines its truth condition; reference (Bedeutung) is what the expression picks out.
Austin distinguished locutionary (meaning of words), illocutionary (speech act performed: promising, warning, asserting), and perlocutionary acts (effects on the audience).
The 20th century split philosophy into two traditions. Analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Moore): logical clarity, conceptual analysis, close attention to language, engagement with science.
Postmodernism (Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard) questioned 'grand narratives' — overarching frameworks (progress, enlightenment, Marxism, Christianity) that claim to explain all history and experience.
Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas): critical theory subjects all social institutions to rational critique, aiming at human emancipation.
Is race a natural kind (biological realism) or a social construction (nominalism)? Social constructionism (Appiah, Haslanger): race is a category invented historically to serve political purposes, with no biological foundation.
Medical model: disability is an individual deficit to be treated or cured. Social model: disability is caused by social barriers preventing people with impairments from participating fully.
Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks): colonialism is a psycho-existential condition as well as a political one — it forces colonised people into alienated self-objectification through the racist gaze.
Wittgenstein (Investigations): meaning is use — language gets its sense from the social practices in which it is embedded (language games and forms of life).
Mill's utilitarian calculus seemed to demand impartiality — treat everyone's happiness equally. But Bernard Williams objected that this demands too much: it alienates us from our own projects and integrity.
Rawlsian domestic theory extended globally: the difference principle applied worldwide would require massive redistribution from rich to poor nations.
Bentham: the question for moral status is not 'can they reason?' but 'can they suffer?' Peter Singer's utilitarian argument: factory farming causes enormous suffering to billions of sentient beings
Principles of bioethics (Beauchamp and Childress): autonomy (respect patient choice), beneficence (do good), non-maleficence (avoid harm), justice (distribute benefits fairly). Informed consent: medical treatment without consent is assault.
Privacy: is privacy a right, and how is it threatened by data collection, surveillance capitalism, and facial recognition? Algorithmic fairness: when do algorithms perpetuate or amplify bias?
Why punish? Retributivism: punishment is deserved — it gives wrongdoers what they're owed, restoring moral balance. Consequentialism: punishment is justified only by its good consequences (deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation).
Legal positivism (Hart): law is a social fact — determined by social sources (enacted laws, judicial decisions) not by moral considerations.
What is art? Expressionist theory: art expresses emotions. Representational theory: art imitates reality. Institutional theory (Danto, Dickie): art is whatever the artworld designates as art — explaining conceptual art and ready-mades.
Paul Ricoeur: narrative identity — the self is not a fixed substance but a story we tell about ourselves, integrating past and future into a coherent whole.
Plato's Symposium: love is a longing for beauty — Socrates (via Diotima) describes ascending from particular beautiful bodies to the Form of Beauty itself.
What philosophical questions are most urgent today? AI and consciousness: can machines have minds, and what follows if they do?
APPLIED ETHICS
Judith Jarvis Thomson's trolley problem: you can pull a lever to divert a runaway trolley — it will kill one person instead of five. Most people say: pull the lever.
Peter Singer's lifeboat ethics reframing: if a child were drowning in front of you, you'd save it regardless of the cost to your clothes.
Just war theory (Aquinas, Walzer): war can be justified only if: just cause (self-defence or protecting the innocent), right intention, last resort, proportional means, discrimination between combatants and civilians, legitimate authority.
Abortion: when (if ever) does a fetus acquire moral status? Thomson's violinist argument: even granting the fetus personhood, abortion may be permissible if the woman has not consented to the use of...
Do states have a right to control their borders? Cosmopolitan view (Carens): birthplace is morally arbitrary — immigration restrictions are like feudal privilege.
Factory farming involves severe animal suffering at enormous scale — Singer's utilitarian case for veganism or vegetarianism follows directly.
What makes sexual activity permissible or wrong? Consent is necessary but is it sufficient? Degrees of consent: enthusiastic, free, informed.
Is the death penalty ever morally justified? Retributive argument: the most heinous crimes deserve the ultimate penalty. Consequentialist objection: capital punishment does not deter crime and risks executing innocent people.
CRISPR gene editing: is it permissible to edit somatic cells (individual therapy), germline cells (heritable changes), or embryos for enhancement (non-therapeutic traits)?
Epicurus: death is not bad for you — when death exists, you do not; so you cannot experience its badness.
What is sport? Formalism: sport is defined by its constitutive rules. Fair play as a moral principle. Performance-enhancing drugs:
Hobbes: without the social contract, life would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' — rational agents contract for security under an absolute sovereign.
Do non-human entities have intrinsic value? Deep ecology (Naess): all living beings have equal intrinsic worth. Biocentric ethics (Taylor): living organisms have teleological centres of life — wellbeing that matters morally.
What is education for? Aristotle: for human flourishing (eudaimonia) — development of virtue and practical wisdom. Liberal education (Newman): formation of the intellectually cultivated person.
How does reason guide action? Kant's categorical imperative: act only on maxims you could will to be universal laws; treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means.
What is happiness? Hedonism: happiness is pleasure minus pain (Bentham's felicific calculus). Desire satisfaction theory: happiness is getting what you want (but some desires are mistaken or trivial).
What gives authority its right to rule? Consent theory: authority is legitimate only with the consent of the governed.
Parfit's non-identity problem: the people who will exist in the future depend on choices we make now
Are cultures objects of special moral protection? Multiculturalism (Taylor, Kymlicka): cultural membership is a primary good — liberal states should actively protect minority cultures.
Berlin's two concepts of liberty: negative liberty (freedom from interference — absence of constraints by others) and positive liberty (freedom to — capacity and opportunity for self-mastery and self-realisation).
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Kalam cosmological argument: everything that begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore the universe has a cause — plausibly personal and enormously powerful.
Paley's watchmaker: just as finding a watch implies a watchmaker, the complexity of living things implies a designer.
Anselm (Proslogion): God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. Such a being must exist in reality (not just in the understanding) because existing in reality is greater than existing...
Logical problem: an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God would know about, prevent, and want to prevent all suffering. Evil exists — so God does not.
Fideism (Kierkegaard, Tertullian): religious faith is not the conclusion of rational argument but a subjective leap beyond reason
William James described religious experience as having four marks: noetic (they seem to convey knowledge), transiency, passivity, and ineffability.
Omnipotence: can God create a stone too heavy for God to lift? Omniscience: does God's foreknowledge of free actions undermine their freedom?
Hick's pluralism: different religions are culturally conditioned responses to the same ultimate divine reality — no single tradition has exclusive truth.
Hume's argument Against miracles: the evidence for natural laws is maximum; a miracle violates natural law; therefore the probability that a miracle occurred is always lower than the probability that witnesses were...
Personal immortality: what would it mean to survive bodily death? If soul is distinct from body, soul could survive — but would it still be you without memory continuity?
Euthyphro dilemma (Plato): is something good because God commands it (divine command theory — makes morality arbitrary), or does God command it because it is good (making goodness independent of God)?
A theodicy attempts to justify God's permission of evil. Soul-making theodicy (Hick): evil is necessary for moral and spiritual growth toward the divine image
How can finite human language apply to an infinite God? Via negativa (apophatic theology): we can only say what God is not
Four Noble Truths: life is suffering (dukkha); suffering arises from craving (tanha); cessation of craving leads to liberation (nirvana); the Eightfold Path is the way.
Al-Kindi introduced Greek philosophy to the Islamic world. Al-Farabi harmonised Plato and Aristotle with Islamic thought. Avicenna (Ibn Sina): floating man thought experiment anticipates Descartes
Six orthodox darsanas (viewpoints): Nyaya (logic), Vaisheshika (atomism), Samkhya (dualism of matter and consciousness), Yoga (mental discipline), Mimamsa (Vedic interpretation), Vedanta (nature of Brahman).
Kierkegaard's three stages: aesthetic (pleasure), ethical (duty), religious (faith). The leap to the religious stage — exemplified by Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac — transcends the ethical.
Confucius emphasised ren (benevolence, humaneness), li (ritual propriety), yi (righteousness), and zhengming (rectification of names — using language correctly).
Laozi's Tao Te Ching: the Tao (Way) is the ineffable source and order of the cosmos
Ubuntu ('I am because we are'): a communal ontology and ethics — personhood is relational and constituted through the community.
GREAT PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTIONS & REVISION
Plato's cave describes prisoners seeing only shadows, mistaking them for reality until one escapes and sees the sun (the Form of the Good).
Nietzsche's proclamation: 'God is dead! And we have killed him.' This is not triumphal atheism but a diagnosis of cultural crisis — the collapse of the highest values.
Philosophy uses thought experiments to test intuitions and reveal hidden assumptions. Trolley problem: consequentialism vs deontology. Chinese Room: syntax vs semantics. Mary's Room: physicalism vs property dualism.
Aristotle: eudaimonia is rational activity in accordance with virtue — not a feeling but an achievement. Epicurus:
Three dimensions of meaning (Susan Wolf): subjective attraction + objective value + active engagement. Cosmic meaninglessness (Nagel's 'The Absurd'): from a sufficiently external viewpoint, nothing we do matters.
Valid deductive argument: conclusion follows necessarily from premises. Sound argument: valid and premises true. Common fallacies:
Ancient Greek philosophy (pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle): nature, knowledge, ethics, the good life. Medieval philosophy (Augustine, Aquinas, Avicenna): reconciling reason with Christian, Islamic, and Jewish revelation.
Socrates: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' Philosophy as a way of life — not merely an academic discipline but a practice of careful self-examination, questioning assumptions, and living consistently with...
Contemporary philosophy faces unprecedented challenges: AI consciousness and rights, climate change ethics, global justice in an unequal world, the neuroscientific study of consciousness, the fragmentation of truth in social media ecosystems, the...
Philosophy (philo-sophia: love of wisdom) asks the most fundamental questions: What exists? What can we know? How should we live? What is the nature of mind, language, beauty, justice?