Beginner index

The questions left over once the sciences have described how things behave

7 min

Whether existence is a property, and what to say about Pegasus and the round square

8 min

The difference between a thing and the ways it is, and what instantiation is meant to be

9 min

The distinction every later dispute leans on, and how badly it resists definition

9 min

How one thing can lose a property without thereby becoming a different thing

9 min

Repair and reassembly leave two equally good candidates for being the original ship

7 min

Why regular succession is not yet causation, and why counterfactual tests do better

10 min

Sorting logical, physical, and metaphysical impossibility before any formal apparatus

9 min

Some of a thing's properties it could not have lacked; most of them it could have

9 min

Three things people run together, and what separates them

7 min

What turns a true belief into something better than a lucky guess

8 min

Where beliefs actually come from, and the way each source can fail

9 min

Dreams, deceiving demons, and why ordinary beliefs are hard to defend

8 min

Knowledge as justified true belief, stated as three separate conditions

10 min

Agrippa's trilemma, and why the structural theories of justification are all answers to it

11 min

Premises, conclusions, and the difference between arguing and asserting

6 min

Why a valid argument can have a false conclusion, and what soundness adds

7 min

Two ways premises can back a conclusion, and why only one of them is the subject of this ladder

8 min

Negation, conjunction, disjunction, the conditional, and the biconditional

9 min

Building the table for any formula, and reading validity off it

10 min

Affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent, and why they fail

7 min

Modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical syllogism, disjunctive syllogism

9 min

Where ordinary English and the truth-functional connectives come apart

11 min

Words, sentences, and the difference between using an expression and talking about it

8 min

How a name picks out a thing and a predicate picks out a feature

9 min

Knowing what a sentence means as knowing what the world would have to be like for it to be true

10 min

Frege's puzzle about informative identities and the idea of a mode of presentation

11 min

Whether a proper name is shorthand for a description of its bearer

10 min

The gap between what a sentence means and what a speaker gets across by uttering it

10 min

Promising, naming, and warning, and why some utterances are acts rather than reports

10 min

Words whose reference shifts with who speaks, where, and when

9 min

Sentences with two meanings, and sentences that mean one thing and say another

9 min

The later Wittgenstein's suggestion that meaning lies in how words are used in a practice

10 min

The difference between reasoning inside a logic and reasoning about one

8 min

Necessity, form, and topic neutrality as three candidate marks of a logical truth

10 min

Lewis Carroll's regress and why a rule of inference cannot be one more premise

9 min

Whether logic describes how we think, and Frege's case that it cannot

9 min

The liar and Russell's paradox as arguments that look valid and end in contradiction

10 min

Rival logics, the quantum logic episode, and what it would take to give up a law of logic

10 min

Intuition, convention, and inference as candidate sources of logical knowledge

9 min

How claims about what is the case differ from claims about what ought to be

6 min

What it is for a consideration to count in favour of something, and why this comes before any theory of right action

9 min

What a theory owes you: a criterion of right action, not a list of verdicts

7 min

Three places a theory can locate rightness, and why they diverge on the same case

9 min

Switch, footbridge, and what the gap between the two verdicts is meant to reveal

8 min

Whether a strong reaction to a case counts as evidence, and how theory building uses it

10 min

The four questions that sit behind first-order ethics: meaning, truth, knowledge, and what moral facts would have to be

9 min

Two descriptions of the same episode, and why nobody has managed to fit them together

7 min

Splitting the mental into what gets processed and what gets felt, and why only one half looks tractable

9 min

Attitudes and their contents, states you are in and states you are merely disposed to, and what the categories are for

8 min

Why the ordinary view that we see objects has been so hard to hold on to

10 min

How good your access to your own mind is, once the traditional claims are separated and tested

10 min

What entitles anyone to think there is something behind anyone else's behaviour

9 min

The difference between existing, being real, and merely being talked about

8 min

Ordinary things, happenings, qualities, and numbers, and why the last two are contested

10 min

One thing said of many, and the first question anyone asks about properties

9 min

Counting things requires knowing when you have one or two, and that turns out to depend on what kind they are

10 min

Kant's complaint that adding 'and it exists' says nothing about a thing, and Frege's way of making that precise

10 min

What a theory says there is, and how rewriting a sentence can change the answer

9 min

The step back from asking what exists to asking what that question means and how to answer it

8 min

Strawson's contrast between mapping how we think about the world and correcting it

9 min

Whether 'I have hands' outweighs any philosophical argument that there are no hands

9 min

Ockham's razor, counting entities, and why a simpler theory might be likelier to be true

10 min

Whether metaphysics has questions of its own or must take its ontology from physics

9 min

Why some commands create obligations and others are only threats backed by force

7 min

Order, defence, and public goods, and the anarchist reply that none of it requires a state

8 min

How freedom from interference, equal standing, and fair shares pull against each other

9 min

Desert, need, and merit as rival bases for a share, and the difference between a fair procedure and a fair outcome

10 min

Claims against others, liberties to act, and the split between rights demanding restraint and rights demanding provision

9 min

What separates a legal system from organised force, and the first split between positivists and natural lawyers

10 min

How consequentialist, deontological, and virtue-based reasoning each turn a moral question into a verdict

9 min

The question of which beings count, and the difference between owing duties to something and having duties about it

8 min

What makes a person worse off, when agreement changes what may be done to them, and where paternalism starts

10 min

Whether killing is worse than letting die, and whether a harm you foresee differs from one you intend

11 min

Claims that others must respect, duties that specify no particular recipient, and acts that are good without being required

10 min

The package of attributes the word normally carries: maximal power, maximal knowledge, perfect goodness, and responsibility for everything else

8 min

Three positions distinguished by what each asserts rather than by how confident anyone feels

9 min

What it means for everything else to depend on God, both at the first moment and at every moment after it

9 min

Whether faith supplements argument, replaces it, or is answerable to it, and what each answer commits you to

10 min

Why almost nobody now offers a proof, and what it means to argue that a hypothesis is instead made more likely by the evidence

10 min