Getting Started

Why Philosophy? Five Views

A Brief Guide to Logic and Argumentation

Some Guidelines for Writing Philosophy Papers

 

PART I: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Chapter 1: Does God Exist?

Anselm of Canterbury, The Ontological Argument

Reader’s Guide: Anselm’s Ontological Argument

Thomas Aquinas, The Five Ways

Reader’s Guide: Aquinas’s Cosmological Argument

William Paley, The Argument from Design

Roger White, The Argument from Cosmological Fine-Tuning

Louise Antony, No Good Reason—The Problem of Evil

Eleonore Stump, The Problem of Evil

 

Chapter 2: Is It Reasonable to Believe without Evidence?

Blaise Pascal, The Wager

Alan Hájek, Pascal’s Ultimate Gamble

W. K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief

William James, The Will to Believe

Alvin Plantinga, Is Belief in God Properly Basic?

Lara Buchak, When Is Faith Rational?

 

PART II: EPISTEMOLOGY

Chapter 3: What Is Knowledge?

Plato, Meno

Edmund Gettier, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?

Reader’s Guide: Gettier’s Definition of Knowledge

Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Belief

NEW Duncan Pritchard, The Value of Knowledge

NEW Reader’s Guide: Pritchard on the Value of Knowledge

NEW Michael Patrick Lynch, The Value of Truth (exclusive)

 

Chapter 4: How Can We Know about What We Have Not Observed?

David Hume, Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding

Reader’s Guide: Hume on Induction

Nelson Goodman, The New Riddle of Induction

Reader’s Guide: Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction

Gilbert Harman, The Inference to the Best Explanation

NEW Ned Hall, Causation and Correlation (exclusive)

NEW C. A. J. Coady, Testimony and Observation

 

Chapter 5: How Can You Know Your Own Mind or the Mind of Another?

Bertrand Russell, The Argument from Analogy

D. M. Armstrong, Introspection

Sarah K. Paul, John Doe and Richard Roe

NEW Alex Byrne, Animal and Artificial Minds (exclusive)

 

Chapter 6: How Can We Know about the External World?

René Descartes, Meditation I

Reader’s Guide: Descartes’s Meditations

David Hume, Of Scepticism with Regard to the Senses

Reader’s Guide: Hume on Skepticism

G. E. Moore, Proof of an External World

Jonathan Vogel, Skepticism and Inference to the Best Explanation

Rae Langton, Ignorance of Things in Themselves

 

PART III: METAPHYSICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Chapter 7: Is Mind Material?

René Descartes, Meditation II, Meditation VI

Elisabeth of Bohemia, Correspondence with Descartes

Antoine Arnauld, Fourth Set of Objections

Gilbert Ryle, Descartes’ Myth

John Searle, Can Computers Think?

NEW Hedda Hassel Mørch, Is Matter Conscious?

 

Chapter 8: What Is Consciousness?

Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Frank Jackson, Epiphenomenal Qualia

Reader’s Guide: Jackson’s Knowledge Argument

Patricia Smith Churchland, Are Mental States Irreducible to Neurobiological States?

David Chalmers, The Hard Problem of Consciousness

NEW Jonathan Birch, Why Is Animal Consciousness Controversial? A Trialogue (Exclusive)

 

Chapter 9: Are Things as They Appear?

Bertrand Russell, Appearance and Reality

George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous

Vasubandhu, Twenty Verses with Autocommentary

Reader’s Guide: Vasubandhu on Idealism

NEW David Chalmers, What Is the Simulation Hypothesis?

 

Chapter 10: What Is There?

Stephen Yablo, A Thing and Its Matter

NEW Theodore Sider, Monism, Pluralism, and Ephemera (exclusive)

Gideon Rosen, Numbers and Other Immaterial Objects

Penelope Maddy, Do Numbers Exist?

 

PART IV: FROM METAPHYSICS TO ETHICS

Chapter 11: What Is Personal Identity?

John Locke, Of Identity and Diversity

Richard Swinburne, The Dualist Theory

Derek Parfit, Personal Identity

Bernard Williams, The Self and the Future

 

Chapter 12: What Is Race? What Is Gender?

Anthony Appiah, The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race

Sally Haslanger, Gender and Race: (What) Are they? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?

Quayshawn Spencer, Are Folk Races Like Dingoes, Dimes, or Dodos?

Elizabeth Barnes, The Metaphysics of Gender

 

Chapter 13: Do We Possess Free Will?

Galen Strawson, Free Will

Roderick Chisholm, Human Freedom and the Self

A. J. Ayer, Freedom and Necessity

P. F. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment

Reader’s Guide: Strawson on Freedom and Resentment

Harry Frankfurt, Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person

Susan Wolf, Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility

 

PART V: ETHICS

NEW Chapter 14: When Are We Morally Responsible for What We Do?

Nomy Arpaly, Why Moral Ignorance Is No Excuse

Michele M. Moody-Adams, Culture, Responsibility, and Affected Ignorance

Angela M. Smith, Implicit Biases, Moral Agency, and Moral Responsibility

NEW Gideon Rosen, Ignorance and Responsibility (exclusive)

 

Chapter 15: What Is the Right Thing to Do?

Peter Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality

Onora O’Neill, The Moral Perplexities of Famine and World Hunger

Judith Jarvis Thomson, A Defense of Abortion

Don Marquis, Why Abortion Is Immoral

Elizabeth Harman, The Moral Significance of Animal Pain and Animal Death

NEW Nick Zangwill, Our Moral Duty to Eat Meat

 

Chapter 16: What Moral Theory Is True?

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Reader’s Guide: Kant’s Moral Theory

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Rosalind Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Gay Science

 

Chapter 17: Is Morality Objective?

J. L. Mackie, The Subjectivity of Values

NEW David Wong, Pluralistic Relativism (exclusive)

Thomas Nagel, Ethics

Philip L. Quinn, The Divine Command Theory

Reader’s Guide: Quinn’s Divine Intention Theory

Elizabeth Harman, Is It Reasonable to “Rely on Intuitions” in Ethics?

Sharon Street, Does Anything Really Matter or Did We Just Evolve to Think So?

Sarah McGrath, What Is Weird about Moral Deference?

 

Chapter 18: Why Do What Is Right?

Plato, The Republic, Book II

Judith Jarvis Thomson, Why Ought We Do What Is Right?

David Hume, Of the Passions and Of Morals

Reader’s Guide: Hume on Moral Motivation

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals I

Reader’s Guide: Kant on Moral Motivation

 

Chapter 19: What Is the Meaning of Life?

Richard Taylor, The Meaning of Life

Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters

Thomas Nagel, The Absurd

Samuel Scheffler, Death and the Afterlife

 

PART VI: POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 20: How Can the State Be Justified?

Aristotle, Politics

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Reader’s Guide: Hobbes’s State of Nature

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Reader’s Guide: Rousseau’s Solution to the Fundamental Problem

A. John Simmons, Rights-Based Justifications for the State

Charles Mills, The Racial Contract

 

Chapter 21: What Is the Value of Liberty?

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Reader’s Guide: Mill on Liberty

Amartya Sen, Elements of a Theory of Human Rights?

NEW Seana Valentine Shiffrin, The Unavoidability of a Thinker-Oriented Free Speech Theory (exclusive)

NEW Robert P. George, Public Morality and the Central Tradition (exclusive)

 

Chapter 22: Does Justice Require Equality?

John Rawls, Two Principles of Justice

NEW Reader’s Guide to Rawls, Two Principles of Justice

Harry Frankfurt, Equality as a Moral Ideal

Martha Nussbaum, Political Equality

Robert Nozick, Distributive Justice

Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?