Browse Philosophies
30 results
Ayn Rand
- Present
Ayn Rand turned the old moral scandal of selfishness into a philosophy of pride: if reason is man’s only means of survival, then to treat the self as a duty is not vice but virtue.
Brain in a Vat
- Present
The brain-in-a-vat is philosophy’s most unsettling courtroom drama: a test of whether thought, language, and evidence can ever prove that the world outside experience is really there.
Charles Peirce
- Present
Charles Peirce built two things at once: a method for clarifying thought and a theory of signs for explaining how thought is possible at all. Too original for his century, he turned philosophy into an inquiry that never stops testing itself against the world.
Chinese Room
- Present
A man in a room follows Chinese characters by rule, answers every question correctly, and still may not understand a word of Chinese. The thought experiment asks whether syntax can ever become semantics—or whether perfect simulation is forever only that.
Communitarianism
- Present
Communitarianism begins with a refusal: before we choose ourselves, we are already shaped by languages, loyalties, histories, and moral inheritances that make choice possible at all.
Cornel West
- Present
Cornel West turned philosophy outward: from the classroom to the street, from pragmatism to prophecy, from private reflection to the public battle over democracy, race, and moral courage.
Daniel Dennett
- Present
Daniel Dennett set out to show that consciousness is not a ghostly extra in the machine, and that free will can be real without being magical—if we stop looking for the wrong kind of soul.
Deep Ecology
- Present
Deep ecology begins with a disquieting claim: the natural world is not valuable because it serves us, but because it exists in its own right. Once that thought is taken seriously, conservation stops being charity and becomes an argument about justice.
Experience Machine
- Present
If a machine could manufacture every pleasure you ever wanted, why wouldn’t that be enough? Nozick’s famous thought experiment survives because it turns that apparently simple question into a test of what we value besides feeling good.
Feminist Philosophy
- Present
Feminist philosophy begins with a dangerous question: if reason has long claimed to speak for everyone, who has been quietly excluded from the word “everyone”? It is the philosophical project that shows how gender is built into the very habits of thought that pretend to transcend it.
Gettier Problem
- Present
In 1963, Edmund Gettier showed that a person can have a belief that is justified and true and yet still fail to know — and in doing so, he turned a tidy definition of knowledge into one of epistemology’s most enduring crises.
Hard Problem of Consciousness
- Present
The hard problem of consciousness asks why any physical process should be accompanied by an inner life at all — why neurons, however elegantly arranged, should give rise to the felt fact that there is something it is like to be you.
John Rawls
- Present
John Rawls asked a devastatingly simple question: if no one knew in advance whether they would be rich or poor, powerful or vulnerable, what principles of justice would they choose for the society they were building? From that thought experiment, he reconstructed political philosophy for the modern democratic age.
Libertarianism
- Present
Libertarianism begins with a simple insistence: if persons own themselves, then political power must justify every intrusion into their lives. From that premise it builds a demanding theory of rights, markets, and the state—and discovers, at every turn, how costly it is to keep liberty from swallowing everything else.
Mary's Room
- Present
What if complete scientific knowledge still leaves out a color only experience can give? Frank Jackson’s Mary makes that question impossible to dismiss, and nearly impossible to answer without changing what we mean by “knowing.”
Newcomb's Paradox
- Present
A perfect predictor, two boxes, and one poisonous question: if your choice can’t change the past, why does one rational answer seem to make people rich and the other seem to make them feel right?
Objectivism
- Present
Objectivism asked a bracingly old question in modern American dress: if reason is our only reliable guide, what kind of self may properly pursue happiness—and what kind of society must be built for that pursuit to remain free?
Posthumanism
- Present
Posthumanism begins where the old picture of “the human” starts to look less like a universal truth than a historical invention—one entangled with machines, animals, code, ecosystems, and power.
Pragmatism
- Present
Pragmatism asks a dangerous, democratic question: if beliefs are tools for living, then their truth is measured not by purity of thought alone, but by what they do in the world.
Prisoner's Dilemma
- Present
Two people can both see the best collective outcome and still choose the move that hurts them most. The Prisoner’s Dilemma turns that familiar human tragedy into a formal shape: a theory of why distrust can beat reason, and why cooperation so often arrives too late.
Robert Nozick
- Present
Robert Nozick turned a question about justice into a challenge to the modern state: if people and their holdings are theirs to use and transfer, what right does anyone have to force a pattern upon them?
The Beetle in a Box
- Present
Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box is a fable about privacy that quietly overturns a cherished picture: if each person could inspect only the box marked “beetle,” the word could never get its meaning from the hidden thing inside.
Thomas Kuhn
- Present
Thomas Kuhn taught readers to see science not as a smooth staircase of facts, but as a sequence of worlds: periods of disciplined puzzle-solving broken by moments when the rules themselves are torn up and replaced.
Transcendentalism
- Present
In New England’s age of pulpits, mills, and borrowed philosophies, Transcendentalism asked a dangerous question: what if the deepest authority in human life is not institution, custom, or even scripture, but the inward light that makes nature legible and the self answerable to the divine within?
Trolley Problem
- Present
The trolley problem is a moral machine in miniature: a rail yard thought experiment that forces us to ask whether doing harm by hand is worse than allowing the same harm to happen by rule.
Twin Earth
- Present
Twin Earth asks a disconcerting question: if two people are alike in every respect inside their heads, can they still mean different things by the very same word? Putnam’s answer helped move philosophy of language out into the world.
Veil of Ignorance
- Present
A just order, Rawls suggests, begins with a wager of radical self-forgetfulness: design the rules as though you will awaken inside them as anyone at all.
W.E.B. Du Bois
- Present
W.E.B. Du Bois made American democracy look at itself in the mirror and see a divided nation: a country where freedom and caste coexisted, and where the self was forced to split under the pressure of the color line.
William James
- Present
William James asked a dangerous question with a practical edge: if ideas are tools for living, should truth be judged by the life they help us make? His answer turned philosophy toward experience, risk, and the consequences of believing.
Zombie Argument
- Present
The zombie argument asks a chillingly simple question: if a being could walk, speak, think, and suffer every outward test of humanity, what would be left to prove that there is anyone home inside?