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Philosophy BranchesTraditional Branches of Philosophy
December 12, 2023

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Political philosophy is at least as old as Plato (428/227 or 424/423-348/347 BC) and is concerned with the nature of the state and, more broadly, with coercive institutions, and their…
Writing Philosophy
November 21, 2023

ESSENTIAL WRITING SKILLS

Having just walked through the basic process of writing a philosophy paper, we turn now to the essential skillset you should develop and apply not only to the writing of…
CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHYHistory Of Philosophy
November 15, 2023

SKEPTICISM (PYRRHONISM)

Pyrrhonian Skepticism was founded by Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–275 BC), who argued that knowledge is impossible. The Skeptics proposed various arguments for their conclusions, including Platonic doubts about the…
PHILOSOPHICAL BOOKS AND TEXT
November 27, 2023

BOOKS TO GUIDE NOVICE PHILOSOPHY STUDENTS

This list is aimed at curating those texts that will both challenge a novice researcher, and continually reward repeated encounters as you develop your philosophical interests.
FORMS OF PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGWriting Philosophy
November 20, 2023

THE ESSAY OF REFUTATION

The essay of refutation takes the position “I disagree.” Its objective is to persuade the reader that the argument of another is false, flawed, unlikely, implausible, or in some other…
CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHYHistory Of Philosophy
November 15, 2023

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was born in Stagira but moved to Athens as a young man to study at Plato’s Academy. Following Plato’s death, Aristotle traveled, became tutor to Alexander the…
PHILOSOPHICAL BOOKS AND TEXT
November 27, 2023

ESSENTIAL READING IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

A comprehensive list of essential readings in the history of philosophy.
Logic
November 15, 2023

PROPOSITIONAL CALCULUS (PROPOSITIONAL LOGIC)

The simplest formal (logical) language is the propositional calculus. This considers the logical relationships that hold between complete propositions.
History Of PhilosophyMEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY
November 15, 2023

THOMISM

A school of thought based on the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Thomism is, like Scholasticism, principally concerned with metaphysics and understanding the attributes of God.
History Of PhilosophyTHE EARLY MODERN PERIOD
November 15, 2023

LIBERALISM

A political philosophy whose central claim is that a government’s authority is justified only insofar as it secures the liberty of its subjects, Liberalism is generally traced to John Locke…
Philosophy BranchesTraditional Branches of Philosophy
December 12, 2023

LOGIC

Logic is concerned with studying the inferences we make, and the formal languages developed to systematize those inferences. This includes both the proof-theories and semantics for these languages, as well…
Philosophy BranchesTraditional Branches of Philosophy
December 12, 2023

METAPHYSICS

Metaphysics is the philosophical investigation of reality, including the nature of the world and the entities it contains. While such an investigation inevitably overlaps with natural philosophy—the sciences, especially physics…
History Of PhilosophyNON-WESTERN PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS
November 15, 2023

AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY

The earliest indigenous African philosophy to produce written documents emerged during the seventeenth century, especially in Ethiopia. Zera Yacob (1599–1692), whose Hatata (1667) has been compared to René Descartes’ Discourse…
Logic
November 15, 2023

MANY-VALUE LOGICS

In the classical logics already discussed, the logical connectives are taken to be bivalent—that is, they allow of only two different truth values: true and false. One natural extension to…
PHILOSOPHICAL BOOKS AND TEXT
November 27, 2023

GUIDES TO PHILOSOPHICAL WRITING

As with developing any skill, learning to write philosophically takes practice. Here are some links to academic sites, along with several style guides, to aid you.

Books

  • How to Be a Stoic

    $13.89
  • Fear and Trembling (Penguin Classics)

    $9.99
  • Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James

    $17.29
  • Status Anxiety

    $14.39
  • The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

    $14.81
  • American Transcendentalism: A History

    $21.66
  • Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and

    $22.00
  • A Brief History of Everything (20th Anniversary Edition)

    $12.99
  • Courage To Be Happy

    $15.99
  • An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language: Learn to Hear What’s Left Unsaid (Bad Arguments)

    $7.69
  • Sade My Neighbor (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

    $22.95
  • Self Reliance

    $4.99
  • Against Method

    $24.95
  • 100 Great Philosophers who Changed the World

    $12.95
  • The Autobiography of Satan

    $23.90
  • Fedón: Diálogos de Platón, Textos Clásicos filosóficos Griegos (Spanish Edition)

    $9.45

Terms & Concepts

S

Strawman

(or Straw Man; gender neutral alternatives: straw person or straw person)An informal fallacy constituted by distorting someone’s position in such a way as to render it unrecognizable and easy to…
A

Aristotelian forms

The four claim types in Aristotelian logic, which are the universal affirmative (All S are P; A proposition), universal negative (No S are P; E-proposition) particular affirmative (Some S are…
P

Possible world

A semantic device for evaluating modal discourse, whereby claims of possibility are made true by what happens at other (accessible) possible worlds. The utility of the semantics leads some philosophers…
E
Existential import
H
Hume’s fork
L
Logical operator
N
Noumenal
A
Agnosticism
D
Duhem-Quine Thesis
A
Anatta
E
Epistemology
T
Tabula Rasa
View All