Book400 BCE
Tao Te Ching
Laozi
Eighty-one short chapters arguing that yielding outlasts force and that the most effective action often looks like restraint.
about 45 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Humanities
Philosophy
The discipline of asking what a question actually means before answering it.
15 fields · 161 topics · 284 curated works
Fields within Philosophy
Logic
10The formal structure of valid inference — deduction, predicate and modal logic, and the fallacies and paradoxes testing them.
Foundations & Overviews · Deductive Reasoning · Inductive Reasoning · Propositional Logic · Predicate Logic
Epistemology
11What knowledge is and whether we have any.
Foundations & Overviews · Theories of Justification · The Gettier Problem · Scepticism · Foundationalism & Coherentism
Metaphysics
11What exists, and in what sense — universals, causation, time, identity, and whether free will survives any of the answers.
Foundations & Overviews · Ontology · Universals & Particulars · Causation · Time
Ethics & Moral Philosophy
12How one ought to act, and what could make that true.
Foundations & Overviews · Consequentialism · Utilitarianism · Deontology · Virtue Ethics
Applied Ethics
11Moral philosophy where the stakes are concrete.
Foundations & Overviews · Bioethics · Animal Ethics · Environmental Ethics · Business Ethics (Philosophical)
Social & Political Philosophy
11The normative foundations of collective life.
Foundations & Overviews · Theories of Justice · Rawls & the Original Position · Libertarian Political Philosophy · Marxist Philosophy
Philosophy of Mind
11The relationship between mental and physical.
Foundations & Overviews · The Mind-Body Problem · Dualism · Physicalism · Functionalism
Philosophy of Science
12What makes a claim scientific, and what science tells us about reality.
Foundations & Overviews · Demarcation Problem · Falsificationism · Paradigms & Scientific Revolutions · Underdetermination
Philosophy of Language
9Meaning, reference, and what words do — theories of meaning, speech acts, the semantics-pragmatics divide, and vagueness.
Foundations & Overviews · Theories of Meaning · Reference & Descriptions · Speech Act Theory · Semantics vs Pragmatics
Aesthetics
10Art, beauty and judgement — what makes a judgement of taste more than a preference, and whether art can be morally assessed.
Foundations & Overviews · Theories of Art · Beauty & Taste · Aesthetic Judgement · Expression & Emotion in Art
Ancient Philosophy
10The Greek and Roman foundations — the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools that followed.
Foundations & Overviews · Presocratics · Socrates · Plato · Aristotle
Medieval & Early Modern Philosophy
12Scholasticism through the rationalist-empiricist divide.
Foundations & Overviews · Augustine · Aquinas & Scholasticism · Islamic Philosophy · Jewish Medieval Philosophy
Nineteenth & Twentieth Century Philosophy
13The modern schools and their quarrel — Hegel to Nietzsche, then pragmatism, Wittgenstein and the analytic turn against both.
Foundations & Overviews · Hegel · Schopenhauer · Kierkegaard · Nietzsche
Eastern & Comparative Philosophy
9Traditions with different starting assumptions.
Foundations & Overviews · Confucianism · Daoism · Buddhist Philosophy · Hindu Philosophy & Vedanta
Practical Philosophy
9Philosophy meant to be used rather than only discussed.
Foundations & Overviews · Stoic Practice · The Examined Life · Meaning & Absurdity · Death & Mortality
Reading in Philosophy
284A way in
Start here
No prior grounding assumed.
Tao Te Ching
Laozi · 400 BCE
Eighty-one short chapters arguing that yielding outlasts force and that the most effective action often looks like restraint.
+73 more at this level
Then
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Meditations on First Philosophy
René Descartes · 1641
Doubts everything doubtable to find one certainty, and hands modern philosophy both its starting point and its mind-body problem.
+72 more at this level
Go deeper
Primary sources and full treatments.
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle · 340 BCE
The good life is activity in accordance with virtue, and virtue is a disposition trained by habit rather than taught by rule.
+136 more at this level
12 of 284 works
Book180
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Private notes on Stoic practice, written by an emperor to himself and never intended to be read by anyone.
about 5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Book400 BCE
The Doctrine of the Mean
Zisi
Argues moral cultivation means finding and holding the mean between excess and deficiency in feeling and action, achieved through a sincerity that aligns inner disposition with outward conduct.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Book399 BCE
Apology
Plato
Socrates defends his practice of questioning Athens's authorities at his trial, arguing that an unexamined life is not worth living even at the cost of his own.
Assumes nothing; it is the trial of Socrates told plainly, and the usual place to start with Plato
about 65 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Notes on this copyFreeEntry
Book380 BCE
Ion
Plato
Argues, through a rhapsode who cannot explain his own skill, that poets do not compose from technical knowledge but from divine inspiration that bypasses reason entirely.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Essay300 BCE
Letter to Menoeceus
Epicurus
Death is nothing to us, because while we exist death is not present, and once death is present we no longer exist, so fearing it rests on a confusion rather than a real threat.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Book300 BCE
The Dhammapada
Buddha
A compiled anthology of the Buddha's teachings in verse, arguing that suffering originates in craving and delusion and ends only through disciplined control of thought, speech and action.
about 50 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Book65
Letters from a Stoic
Seneca
Practical Stoicism delivered as correspondence — on time, wealth, fear and the shortness of a life spent badly.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Book108
Discourses
Epictetus
Records, in the plain speech of his own lectures rather than the polished aphorisms later drawn from them, the Stoic case that only our own judgements and choices are up to us, and that freedom consists in wanting only those.
link checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Book125
Enchiridion
Epictetus
Distinguishes sharply between what is up to us — judgement, desire, will — and what is not, arguing that all suffering comes from confusing the two, and that only the former is within our power to control.
about 45 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026FreeEntry
Book422
Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love
Augustine of Hippo
A short handbook written for a layman who asked what to believe, hope for and love, condensing Augustine's theology of grace and sin into one accessible statement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Book524
The Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius
Written in prison awaiting execution, a dialogue with a personified Philosophy arguing that fortune's turns cannot touch a good genuinely possessed, because true goods are internal rather than granted by chance.
about 3 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026