Philosophy 101
Philosophy 101 introduces the central questions, major thinkers, and enduring traditions of Western philosophy from ancient Greece to the present, covering metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of mind — building the conceptual tools to think rigorously about fundamental questions.
Who Should Take This
Ideal for students in introductory philosophy courses, humanities learners who want a rigorous grounding in the Western philosophical canon, and professionals in law, ethics, or policy who need fluency in ethical frameworks and political theory. No prior philosophy background required.
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Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
13 Activity Formats
Course Outline
1Introduction to Philosophy 6 topics
Identify the major branches of philosophy — metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, political philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind — and describe the central questions each branch investigates
Identify the components of a philosophical argument — premise, inference, and conclusion — and apply the distinction between valid and invalid arguments and sound and unsound arguments in logic
Apply the principle of charitable interpretation to reconstruct the strongest version of a philosophical argument before evaluating it, and identify common informal fallacies including ad hominem, straw man, and false dilemma
Distinguish a priori from a posteriori knowledge and analytic from synthetic propositions, and explain why Kant's claim that synthetic a priori knowledge exists was philosophically revolutionary
Apply thought experiment methodology to philosophical reasoning — including counterexamples and reductio ad absurdum — and explain why carefully constructed hypothetical cases are treated as evidence in philosophical argument
Analyze the relationship between philosophy and science by evaluating whether philosophical questions are empirically answerable and what distinguishes a conceptual question from an empirical one
2Ancient Greek Philosophy 7 topics
Identify the major pre-Socratic philosophers and their central theses including Thales' water monism, Heraclitus's flux and the logos, Parmenides' denial of change, and Democritus's atomism
Describe the Socratic Method including its elenctic structure, its goal of exposing false certainty and aporia, and Socrates' claim that the unexamined life is not worth living
Describe Plato's Theory of Forms including the Form-particular distinction, the allegory of the cave as an epistemological metaphor, and the relationship between Forms, knowledge, and opinion
Describe Aristotle's critique of Plato's Theory of Forms, Aristotle's hylomorphic account of substance as matter-plus-form, and his four causes (material, formal, efficient, final)
Describe Aristotle's account of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics including the doctrine of the mean, eudaimonia as the highest good, the role of habituation in acquiring virtues, and the distinction between intellectual and moral virtues
Apply Plato's and Aristotle's political philosophies to compare their views on the ideal state, the role of the philosopher-king versus the citizen, the purpose of politics, and the relationship between individual virtue and civic life
Analyze the tension between Platonic rationalism — knowledge through reason of eternal Forms — and Aristotelian empiricism — knowledge through observation of the natural world — and evaluate the epistemological implications of each position
3Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy 5 topics
Describe Augustine's synthesis of Neoplatonism and Christian theology including original sin, divine illumination theory of knowledge, and the problem of evil, and explain how Augustine framed faith as preceding understanding
Describe Aquinas's five ways (arguments for God's existence), his natural law theory, and his reconciliation of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, including the distinction between faith and reason
Apply the ontological argument (Anselm) and the cosmological argument (Aquinas's Third Way) to evaluate whether these arguments successfully establish God's existence, identifying their premises and the objections of Kant and Hume
Analyze the medieval controversy between realism and nominalism over the status of universals and explain how this debate anticipates the rationalism-empiricism debate of the early modern period
Apply the Euthyphro dilemma — is something pious because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is pious — to evaluate the relationship between divine command theory and independent moral standards
4Rationalism 6 topics
Describe Descartes' method of doubt, the Cogito ergo sum as an indubitable foundation, and his argument for the existence of the self as a thinking thing distinct from the body
Describe Descartes' substance dualism including the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa and the mind-body interaction problem, including the pineal gland solution and its critics
Describe Spinoza's substance monism — God or Nature as the single infinite substance with infinite attributes — and explain how this view collapses Cartesian dualism and implies a form of pantheism
Describe Leibniz's monadology including windowless monads, pre-established harmony, and the principle of sufficient reason, and explain how Leibniz tries to preserve individual substance identity while denying causal interaction between substances
Apply rationalist epistemology to explain why Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz believed innate ideas and reason alone — not sensory experience — provide certain knowledge, citing their specific arguments for the unreliability of the senses
Analyze the mind-body problem as posed by Descartes and evaluate the three main rationalist solutions — occasionalism, pre-established harmony, and Spinoza's dual-aspect monism — for their coherence and explanatory adequacy
5Empiricism and Kant 7 topics
Describe Locke's rejection of innate ideas, his tabula rasa doctrine, and his distinction between simple and complex ideas and primary versus secondary qualities of objects
Describe Berkeley's immaterialist argument that esse est percipi — to be is to be perceived — and explain how Berkeley attempted to avoid solipsism through the claim that God continuously perceives all things
Describe Hume's bundle theory of the self, his problem of induction, his analysis of causation as constant conjunction rather than necessary connection, and the fork between relations of ideas and matters of fact
Describe Kant's Copernican Revolution in epistemology — the mind actively structures experience through the forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of understanding — and explain how this resolves the rationalism-empiricism debate
Apply Hume's problem of induction to evaluate the justification for scientific generalizations and cause-and-effect claims, and explain why Kant regarded Hume's skepticism as the stimulus for his own critical philosophy
Describe Hegel's dialectical method of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the Absolute Spirit's self-realization through history, and how Hegel's idealism responds to Kant's limitation of knowledge to phenomena
Analyze the progression from Humean skepticism through Kant's transcendental idealism to Hegelian absolute idealism, evaluating how each position attempts to secure knowledge against its predecessor's skeptical challenges
6Ethics 7 topics
Describe virtue ethics including Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, the role of practical wisdom (phronesis), the cultivation of character through habituation, and the goal of eudaimonia as a life lived in accordance with virtue
Describe Kant's deontological ethics including the categorical imperative in its universalizability formulation and its humanity formulation, the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties, and the concept of the good will
Describe utilitarian ethics including Bentham's hedonic calculus, Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures, and the principle of utility as the criterion for right action
Apply virtue ethics, Kantian deontology, and utilitarianism to a common moral dilemma — such as lying to a murderer about a friend's location — and explain the distinct verdict each framework produces and why
Describe contractarian ethics including Hobbes' social contract as escape from the state of nature, Locke's natural rights-based contract, Rousseau's general will, and Rawls' veil of ignorance as a device for deriving principles of justice
Apply metaethical frameworks — moral realism, relativism, emotivism, and error theory — to evaluate whether moral claims express objective truths, cultural norms, emotional attitudes, or systematically false beliefs
Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarian ethics versus Kantian deontology using classic objections — the utility monster, the transplant surgeon thought experiment for utilitarianism; conflicting duties, rigidity for Kantianism
7Existentialism 6 topics
Describe Kierkegaard's three stages of existence — aesthetic, ethical, and religious — and his concept of the leap of faith as a response to the absurdity of religious commitment that reason alone cannot justify
Describe Nietzsche's death of God thesis, the will to power, the Übermensch as a value-creator beyond slave morality, and the eternal recurrence as an existential test of life affirmation
Describe Sartre's existentialism including the claim that existence precedes essence, radical freedom and responsibility, bad faith as self-deceptive denial of freedom, and the Other as a threat to freedom
Apply Camus's concept of the absurd — the conflict between human desire for meaning and the world's silence — to explain the three responses of physical suicide, philosophical suicide, and revolt, and why Camus recommends revolt
Analyze how existentialism's emphasis on radical individual freedom and authenticity responds to and diverges from the Kantian ethical tradition that grounds morality in universal rational principles
Apply Nietzsche's critique of slave morality and ressentiment to evaluate whether conventional moral systems covertly serve the interests of the weak by reframing weakness as virtue and strength as vice
8Philosophy of Mind 6 topics
Identify the main positions in the mind-body debate — substance dualism, property dualism, type identity theory, token physicalism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism — and describe the core claim of each position
Describe the functionalist theory of mind — mental states are defined by their causal-functional roles rather than their physical substrate — and explain Turing's imitation game as a functionalist criterion for machine intelligence
Describe the hard problem of consciousness as formulated by Chalmers — explaining why there is subjective experience (qualia) at all, not just why neural processes correlate with behavior — and contrast it with the easy problems of consciousness
Apply Searle's Chinese Room argument to evaluate the functionalist claim that any system implementing the right input-output function thereby has genuine understanding and mental states
Apply the knowledge argument (Mary's Room) and the zombie thought experiment to evaluate whether physicalism can fully account for the qualitative character of conscious experience
Analyze the implications of the hard problem of consciousness for artificial intelligence, personal identity, and free will, evaluating whether any physical or computational account of mind can fully explain subjective experience
9Political Philosophy 5 topics
Describe the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau — their distinct accounts of the state of nature, the terms of the social contract, the sovereign's legitimacy, and the right of revolution
Describe Mill's harm principle from On Liberty — the only legitimate basis for state coercion is preventing harm to others — and explain the distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding actions in liberal political theory
Describe Rawls' theory of justice as fairness from A Theory of Justice, including the original position, the veil of ignorance, the difference principle, and the priority of basic liberties over social and economic inequalities
Apply the frameworks of Hobbes, Locke, and Rawls to evaluate a specific political question — such as the justification for redistributive taxation — explaining the distinct verdict each framework produces
Analyze the tension between individual liberty and social equality as fundamental political values and evaluate how libertarianism (Nozick), egalitarianism (Rawls), and communitarianism (Sandel) propose different resolutions
10Analytic and Continental Philosophy 5 topics
Distinguish analytic from continental philosophy in terms of methodology, style, and central preoccupations, identifying key figures of each tradition including Russell, Wittgenstein, and Frege for analytic; Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida for continental
Describe Wittgenstein's early picture theory of meaning from the Tractatus and his later private language argument and language games from the Philosophical Investigations and explain how his thought underwent a radical shift
Describe Heidegger's phenomenological ontology including Dasein, being-in-the-world, thrownness, authenticity, and the distinction between the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand modes of encountering things
Apply the analytic-continental distinction to evaluate a specific philosophical debate — such as the nature of meaning or the status of the subject — and explain why philosophers in each tradition often talk past one another
Analyze how the linguistic turn in 20th-century philosophy — the shift from questions about objects to questions about language and meaning — transformed both analytic and continental traditions despite their different methodologies
Scope
Included Topics
- Branches of philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of mind), pre-Socratics (Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus), Socrates/Plato/Aristotle (Socratic method, Theory of Forms, virtue ethics, Nicomachean Ethics, politics), medieval philosophy (Augustine, Aquinas, natural law, faith and reason), rationalists (Descartes mind-body problem, Spinoza's substance monism, Leibniz monads), empiricists (Locke's tabula rasa, Berkeley's idealism, Hume's bundle theory and problem of induction), Kant and German idealism (Critique of Pure Reason, categorical imperative, Hegel's dialectic), ethics (virtue ethics, deontological ethics, utilitarianism, contractarianism, applied ethics), existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus), analytic versus continental philosophy, philosophy of mind (dualism, physicalism, functionalism, qualia, the hard problem of consciousness), political philosophy (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Rawls, social contract theory, justice)
Not Covered
- Eastern philosophy and non-Western philosophical traditions (covered separately)
- Advanced formal logic and symbolic logic beyond basic argument forms
- Philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics in depth
- Contemporary analytic metaphysics (possible worlds, mereology) beyond introductory level
- Applied ethics sub-fields (bioethics, environmental ethics) beyond introductory overview
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