Philosophy Slides

Aesthetics — Deck 08

A philosophical gallery of beauty, taste, and art — across three centuries of careful argument and an even longer tradition of looking.

Philosophy15 slides

Ancient Greek Philosophy — Deck 01

All men by nature desire to know.

Eastern Philosophy — Deck 02

The Way that can be told is not the eternal Way.

Ethics of Technology

The philosophy of technology is the philosophical investigation of artefacts, systems, and the practices they sustain. It is younger than most of philosophy and older than most of computing — its modern form took shape in the mid-20th century, when Heidegger, Ellul, and Mumford each independently concluded that the technological systems of industrial modernity had begun to reshape the humans inside them.

Ethics and Moral Philosophy

The Study of What We Ought to Do, and Why

Existentialism

Existence Precedes Essence -- the Philosophy of Radical Freedom

Philosophy15 slides

Logic — Deck 05

Two and a half thousand years of trying to write down what it means for one thing to follow from another.

Phenomenology

The Philosophy of Experience and Appearance

Philosophy of Art

The philosophy of art is the philosophical investigation of what art is, what makes something beautiful, what aesthetic experience consists in, and why any of it matters. The discipline is as old as Plato's Republic and as current as last week's debate about whether AI-generated images are art.

Philosophy of Language

The philosophy of language is the philosophical investigation of meaning, reference, truth, and the relation of language to thought and world. As an organised research programme, it is the central achievement of analytic philosophy — the discipline that, in the early 20th century, redirected philosophical attention from the structure of consciousness to the structure of language.

Philosophy of Mind

Consciousness, Intentionality, and the Puzzle of Subjective Experience

Philosophy32 slides

Philosophy of Science

A second-order discipline. Philosophy of science does not do science; it studies what scientists do, what they should do, and why we are entitled to believe them.

Political Philosophy — Deck 06

Why obey? Why this government, and not another? Who owns the world? Six answers across four centuries — and the standing arguments, still in print, against each.

Pragmatism — Deck 10

Notes on the most American of philosophical traditions — from a metaphysical club in Cambridge, Mass., 1872, through John Dewey's classroom, to the ironist liberalism of Richard Rorty.

Stoicism

The Philosophy of Inner Citadels and Rational Virtue

Aesthetics — What Makes a Thing Beautiful?

What makes a thing beautiful?

Greek Philosophy — from Thales to the Stoics

Athens — Aegean — Ionia Greek Philosophy from Thales to the Stoics

Eastern Philosophy — The Long Traditions

Eastern Philosophy the long traditions

The Enlightenment — Reason against Tradition

Of the Age of Lights — A Discourse in XIII Plates

Epistemology — What can be known?

From Plato's Theaetetus to the replication crisis — a brief survey of the theory of knowledge: its objects, its sources, and the limits of what we may justifiably claim to know.

Ethics — How should one live?

Five frameworks. One trolley. A persistent question. The brief atlas of moral philosophy.

Existentialism — A Brief Introduction

Not “what is the world?”

Logic — The Form of Valid Inference

From the syllogism to incompleteness: twenty-three centuries of trying to mechanize reasoning, and the discovery that reason itself has limits.

Philosophy of Mind — The puzzle of the inner life

What is consciousness, why does it feel like anything, and could a machine ever have it? A short tour through the puzzles, positions, and thought experiments that won't sit still.