TOPICS IN PHILOSOPHY

The puzzles philosophers keep returning to — about freedom, mind, identity, and what is.

• Free will

  Are your choices yours, or the inevitable output of physics + biology + upbringing?

• Consciousness

  Why is there something it's like to be you? Why isn't the lights-on, no-one-home alternative just as physically possible?

• The meaning of life

  Not "what is the answer" but "what kind of question is this".

• Personal identity

  You at 5, you at 25, you at 75 — what makes them all "you"?

• The mind-body problem

  How does the wet electrical mass between your ears produce the experience of being you?

• Solipsism

  How do you know other minds exist? The challenge that's philosophically harder than it looks.

• Determinism

  If everything follows from prior causes, what room is left for freedom — or for blame?

• The problem of evil

  If God is all-powerful and all-good, why does suffering exist? The hardest question in theology.

The named movements — stoicism, existentialism, pragmatism. Different starting points, different answers.

• Stoicism

  Live according to nature, focus on what you control, accept what you don't.

• Existentialism

  You exist first, then you make yourself. Meaning isn't given — it's chosen.

• Nihilism

  Nothing has inherent meaning, value, or truth — and that is the starting point, not the end.

• Absurdism

  The human need for meaning meets a universe that won't supply it. We live in that gap.

• Skepticism

  How sure can we really be of anything — and what should we do with the uncertainty?

• Empiricism vs rationalism

  Does knowledge come from experience or from reason? The 350-year argument.

• Phenomenology

  The careful description of experience as experience — before any theory about what it really is.

• Pragmatism

  Truth is what works under inquiry. Ideas earn their keep by their consequences for action.

• Hedonism

  Pleasure is the only thing intrinsically good. Everything else is good only insofar as it leads there.

Three traditions that shaped half the world — and got mostly cut from the Western syllabus.

• Buddhism (philosophical)

  A 2,500-year tradition built around three claims about the self, suffering, and attention.

• Daoism

  Live in accord with the way things move. Stop forcing. Notice what your interference produces.

• Confucianism

  The self is constituted by its relationships. Ritual + role + cultivation, not freedom from these.

What we owe each other. What makes a life good. How to act when the rules run out.

• Utilitarianism

  The right action is the one that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

• Virtue ethics

  Don't ask "what should I do?" Ask "what kind of person should I become?"

• The trolley problem

  A runaway trolley will kill five people unless you pull a lever to divert it onto a track where it kills one. Do you pull?

• Justice

  What do we owe each other, and what makes a distribution fair?

• The social contract

  Why submit to political authority? Because a rational agent would have agreed to.

• Moral luck

  Should chance affect how blameworthy you are? Our intuitions say one thing; our principles another.

• Philosophy of love

  Is romantic love a feeling, a choice, a virtue, a contract — or something stranger than any of these?

• Authenticity

  What would it mean to actually be yourself — and is "yourself" even a coherent thing to be?

• Eudaimonia — the good life

  Aristotle's answer: not pleasure, not virtue alone, but the activity of a whole life lived well.

How we know what we know. What makes something beautiful. The theory side of the map.

• Truth

  Is truth a relationship between sentences and reality, or something built up inside our practices?

• Epistemology — what is knowledge?

  The classical answer: justified true belief. The four-decade argument over whether that's enough.

• Aesthetics — what is beauty?

  Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, in the object, in the relationship between them, or somewhere else?