Introduction
The aim of this book is to introduce you to the topics and methods of philosophy by advancing a series of arguments for controversial philosophical conclusions. That’s what I’ll do in the chapters that follow. In this introduction, I’ll give you an overview of what I’ll be arguing for in the different chapters, explain what an argument is and identify some common argumentative strategies. I’ll close by saying a few words about what philosophy is.
The Chapters
As I explained in the preface, each chapter is written in character, representing a specific perspective (not necessarily my own!) on the issue in question. This is not to say that they are all written from the same perspective. You should not expect the separate chapters to fit together into a coherent whole. I realize that this may cause some confusion. But you should take this as an invitation to engage with the book in the way that I intend for you to engage with it: by questioning the claims being made and deciding for yourself whether the reasons and arguments offered in support of those claims are convincing.
In 1 Can God Allow Suffering?, I advance an argument that an all-powerful and morally perfect God would not allow all the suffering we find in the world, and therefore must not exist. I address a number of attempts to explain why God might allow suffering, for instance that it’s necessary for appreciating the good things that we have, or for building valuable character traits, or for having free will. I also address the response that God has hidden reasons for allowing suffering that we cannot expect to understand.
In 2 Why You Should Bet on God, I advance an argument that you should believe in God because it is in your best interest: you’re putting yourself in the running for an eternity in heaven without risking losing anything of comparable value. I defend the argument against a variety of objections, for instance that it is incredibly unlikely that God exists, that merely believing in God isn’t enough to gain entry into heaven, and that it’s impossible to change one’s beliefs at will.
In 3 What Makes You You, What Makes You You, I criticize a number of attempts to answer the question of personal identity: under what conditions are a person at one time and a person at another time one and the same person? I reject the suggestion that personal identity is a matter of having the same body, on the basis of an argument from conjoined twins and an argument from the possibility of two people swapping bodies. I also reject the suggestion that personal identity can be defined in terms of psychological factors on the strength of “fission” cases in which a single person’s mental life is transferred into two separate bodies.
In 4 Don’t Fear the Reaper, I advance an argument that death cannot be bad for you, since you don’t experience any painful sensations while dead, and that since death is not bad for you it would be irrational to fear it. I argue that you don’t experience any painful sensations while dead by way of arguing that physical organisms cease to be conscious when they die and that you are a physical organism. I also address the suggestion that what makes death bad for you is that it deprives you of pleasant experiences you would otherwise have had.
In 5 No Freedom, I advance two arguments for the conclusion that no one ever acts freely. The first turns on the idea that all of our actions are determined by something that lies outside our control, namely the strength of our desires. The second turns on the idea that our actions are all consequences of exceptionless, “deterministic” laws of nature. In response to the concern that the laws may not be deterministic, I argue that undetermined, random actions wouldn’t be free either. Finally, I address attempts to show that there can be free will even in a deterministic universe.
In 6 You Know Nothing, I argue for two skeptical conclusions. First, I advance an argument that we cannot know anything about the future. That’s so, I argue, because all of our reasoning about the future relies on an assumption that we have no good reason to accept, namely that the future will resemble the past. Second, I advance an argument that we cannot know anything about how things presently are in the world around us, since we cannot rule out the possibility that we are currently having an incredibly vivid dream.
In 7 Against Prisons and Taxes, I argue that it is wrong for governments to tax or imprison their citizens, on the grounds that these practices are not relevantly different from a vigilante locking vandals in her basement and robbing her neighbors to pay for her makeshift prison. I address a variety of putative differences, with special attention to the suggestion that we have tacitly consented to following the law and paying taxes and thereby entered into a “social contract” with the government.
In 8 The Ethics of Abortion, I examine a number of arguments both for and against the immorality of abortion. I argue that the question cannot be settled by pointing to the fact that the embryo isn’t self-sufficient or conscious or rational, nor by pointing to the fact that it has human DNA, that it is a potential person, or that life begins at conception. I then examine the argument that abortion is immoral because the embryo has a right to life, and I show that the argument fails since having a right to life doesn’t entail having a right to use the mother’s womb. Finally, I advance an alternative argument for the immorality of abortion, according to which this killing, like other killings, is wrong because it deprives its victim of a valuable future. I close the chapter by arguing that, although immoral, abortion should not be illegal.
In 9 Eating Animals is Immoral, I defend the view that it is immoral to eat meat that comes from so-called “factory farms.” I begin by criticizing three common reasons for thinking that eating meat is morally acceptable: because people have always eaten meat, because eating meat is necessary, and because eating meat is natural. I then argue that eating factory-farmed meat is immoral, on the grounds that it would be immoral to raise and slaughter puppies in similar ways and for similar reasons.
In 10 What Makes Things Right, I advance a “utilitarian” theory of morality, according to which the rightness or wrongness of an action is always entirely a matter of the extent to which it increases or decreases overall levels of happiness in the world. I defend the theory against the objection that it wrongly permits killing one person to save five. Along the way, I consider the ways in which morality is and isn’t subjective and variable across cultures, and what to say about the notorious “trolley cases.”
In Appendix A — Logic, I examine one of the features that makes an argument a good argument, namely validity. I explain what it means for an argument to be valid, and I provide illustrations of different types of valid arguments.
In Appendix B — Writing, I present a model for writing papers for philosophy courses: introduce the view or argument you plan to criticize (Introducing Your Target) advance your objections (Advancing Your Argument), and address likely responses to your objections (Anticipating Possible Responses). I explain the importance of clear and unpretentious writing that is charitable towards opposing viewpoints; I offer advice for editing rough drafts; I identify some criteria that philosophy instructors commonly use when evaluating papers; and I explain the difference between consulting online sources and plagiarizing them.
In Appendix C — Arguments, I collect together the key arguments, thought experiments, and theses discussed in the book. Readers may find it helpful to have a printed copy of this appendix at hand, or have it open in a separate tab, while reading through the chapters.
The Elements of Arguments
Let’s begin by having a look at what an argument is. An argument is a sequence of claims, consisting of premises, a conclusion, and in some cases one or more subconclusions. The conclusion is what the argument is ultimately trying to establish, or what’s ultimately being argued for. The premises are the assumptions that, taken together, are meant to serve as reasons for accepting the conclusion. A subconclusion is a claim that is meant to be established by some subset of the premises but that isn’t itself the ultimate conclusion of the argument.
As an illustration, consider the following argument:
The argument has three premises: FD1, FD2, and FD4. FD5 is the conclusion of the argument, since that’s what the argument is ultimately trying to establish. FD3 is a subconclusion. It isn’t the conclusion, since the ultimate goal of the argument is to establish that you shouldn’t fear death, not that being dead isn’t bad for you (which is just a step along the way). Nor is it a premise, since it isn’t merely being assumed. Rather, it’s been argued for: it is meant to be established by FD1 and FD2.
In this book, you can always tell which claims in the labeled and indented arguments are premises, conclusions, and subconclusions. The conclusion is always the final claim in the sequence. The subconclusions are anything that begins with a “So” other than the final claim. Any claim that doesn’t begin with “So” is a premise.
However, when it comes to unlabeled arguments—arguments appearing in paragraph form—all bets are off. For instance, I might say:
Death isn’t bad for you. After all, you cease to be conscious when you die, and something can’t be bad for you if you’re not even aware of it. And if that’s right, then you shouldn’t fear death, since it would be irrational to fear something that isn’t bad for you.
The paragraph begins with a subconclusion, the conclusion shows up right in the middle of the paragraph, and neither of them is preceded by a ‘So’. Here, you have to use some brain-power and clues from the context to figure out which bits are the basic assumptions (the premises), which bit is the conclusion, and which bits are mere subconclusions.
All of the labeled arguments in the book are constructed in such a way that the conclusion is a logical consequence of the premises—or, as I sometimes put it, the conclusion “follows from” the premises. You may or may not agree with FD1, and you may or may not agree with FD2. But what you can’t deny is that FD1 and FD2 together entail FD3. If FD3 is false, then it must be that either FD1 or FD2 (or both) is false. You would be contradicting yourself if you accepted FD1 and FD2 but denied FD3. Because all the arguments are constructed in this way, you cannot reject the conclusion of any of the labeled arguments in the book while agreeing with all of the premises. You must find some premise to deny if you do not want to accept the conclusion. (See Appendix A — Logic for more on how to tell when a conclusion is a logical consequence of some premises.)
Premises and Conditionals
There are no restrictions on which sorts of statements can figure as premises in an argument. A premise can be a speculative claim like FD1 or a conceptual truth like FD4. A premise can also be a statement of fact, for instance that a six-week-old embryo has a beating heart, or it can be a moral judgment, for instance that a six-week-old embryo has a right to life. Arguments can have premises that are mere matters of opinion, for instance that mushrooms are tasty. They can even have premises that are utterly and obviously false, for instance that the sky is yellow or that 1+1=3. Any claim can be a premise.
That said, an argument is only as strong as its premises. The point of giving an argument is to persuade people of its conclusion, and an argument built on dubious, indefensible, or demonstrably false premises is unlikely to persuade anyone.
Arguments frequently contain premises of the form ‘if… then…’, like FD2 and FD4. Such statements are called conditionals, and there are names for the different parts of a conditional. The bit that comes between the ‘if’ and the ‘then’ is the antecedent of the conditional, and the bit that comes after the ‘then’ is the consequent of the conditional. Using FD2 as an illustration, the antecedent is you cease to be conscious when you die, the consequent is being dead is not bad for you, and the conditional is the whole claim: if you cease to be conscious when you die then being dead is not bad for you.
(Strictly speaking, conditionals don’t have to be of the form ‘if… then…’. They can also be of the form ‘… only if…’, as in ‘You should fear death only if being dead is bad for you’, or of the form ‘… if …’, as in ‘You shouldn’t fear death if being dead isn’t bad for you’.)
Conditionals affirm a link between two claims, and you can agree that some claims are linked in the way a conditional says they are, even if you don’t agree with the claims themselves. To see this, consider the following argument:
You might object to this argument because you think that Kristina is 22 and that she is allowed to buy alcohol. Still, you should agree with the conditional premise DK2: you should agree that being 20 years old and buying alcohol are linked in the way DK2 says they are. You should agree that DK2 is true even though you disagree with both its antecedent and its consequent. To deny DK2, you’d have to think, for instance, that the legal drinking age in the US was 18. But if you agree that the legal drinking age is 21, then your quarrel is not with DK2; it’s with DK1.
Likewise, you can agree with the conditional premise FD4 even if you think that being dead is bad for you. To disagree with FD4, you’d have to think that it’s sometimes rational to fear things that aren’t bad for you.
Common Argumentative Strategies
Arguments can play a variety of different roles in philosophical debates. Let’s have a look as some common argumentative strategies that you’ll encounter in the book.
First, an argument can be used to defend a premise from another argument. Premise FD1 of the Against Fearing Death argument—that you cease to be conscious when you die—is hardly obvious. So, someone who likes the Against Fearing Death argument might try to produce a further argument in defense of that premise, like the following:
Notice that in the context of the Brain Death Argument FD1 is a conclusion, whereas in the context of the Against Fearing Death argument it’s a premise. Which role a given statement is playing can vary from one argument to the next. And whenever one wants to deny a claim that’s a conclusion of an argument, one must identify some flaw in that argument. That means that anyone who planned to resist the Against Fearing Death argument by denying FD1 now has to reckon with this Brain Death Argument.
Second, an argument can be used to challenge another argument. There are two ways of doing so. One would be to produce an argument for the opposite conclusion. For instance, one might advance the following argument against FD5:
Notice that UF3 is a denial of the conclusion of the Against Fearing Death argument. Thus, if the Uncertain Fate Argument is successful, then something must go wrong in the Against Fearing Death argument, though it would still be an open question where exactly it goes wrong.
Another way to challenge an argument is to produce a new argument against a premise of the argument you wish to challenge. Here, for instance, is an argument against FD1 of the Against Fearing Death argument:
Unlike the Uncertain Fate Argument, The Afterlife Argument challenges a premise of the Against Fearing Death argument, and does indicate where that argument is supposed to go wrong.
I don’t mean to suggest that these are especially good arguments. Not all arguments are created equal! People who believe in the afterlife aren’t likely to be convinced by the Brain Death Argument, and people who don’t believe in the afterlife aren’t likely to be convinced by the Afterlife Argument. As you read on, you’ll discover that a lot of the work in philosophy involves trying to construct arguments that will be convincing even to those who aren’t initially inclined to accept their conclusions.
Counterexamples
Arguments often contain premises which contend that things are always a certain way. For instance, someone who is pro-life might advance the following argument:
The second premise, BH2, says that killing things that have beating hearts is always immoral. Put another way, the fact that something has a beating heart is sufficient for killing it to be immoral.
Arguments also often contain premises which contend that things are never a certain way. For instance, someone who is pro-choice might advance the following argument in defense of abortion:
The second premise, CN2, says that killing things that aren’t conscious is never wrong. Put another way, in order for a killing to be wrong, it’s necessary for the victim to be conscious at the time of the killing.
When a premise says that things are always a certain way or that they’re never a certain way, it’s making a very strong claim. And one can challenge such a claim by coming up with counterexamples, examples in which things aren’t the way that the premise says things always are, or in which things are the way that the premise says things never are. For instance, you might challenge BH2 by pointing out that worms have hearts, and it isn’t immoral to kill them. And you might challenge CN2 by pointing out that it’s wrong to kill someone who’s temporarily anesthetized, even though they’re unconscious. In other words, worms are counterexamples to BH2 and anesthetized people are counterexamples to CN2.
These counterexamples can then be put to work in arguments of their own, for instance:
Argument by counterexample is a very common argumentative strategy, and we’ll see many examples in the different chapters of the book.
It’s important to realize that these arguments do not require saying that embryos are in every way analogous to worms or to temporarily anesthetized adults, or that killing an embryo is the moral equivalent of killing a worm or a temporarily anesthetized adult. The arguments from counterexamples formulated above don’t say anything at all about embryos. Rather, they’re giving independent reasons for rejecting the general principles (BH2 and CN2) being employed in the Beating Heart Argument and the Consciousness Argument.
One last thing. You’ll sometimes encounter claims in the book that include the phrase “if and only if.” For instance, later on in the book we’ll address the question of what makes something bad for you. Breaking your leg is bad for you, and relaxing in a hot tub isn’t bad for you. Those are just some examples of things that are and aren’t bad for you, but suppose we wanted to give a more general answer to the question of what makes something bad for you. Here’s a first stab at doing so, which we’ll encounter in 4 Don’t Fear the Reaper:
- Hedonism (HD)
- Something is bad for you if and only if it’s painful.
HD gives the right results in the cases we just considered: it says that breaking your leg is bad for you, since that’s painful, and that relaxing in a hot tub isn’t bad for you, since that’s not painful.
HD can be seen as two claims packed into one. First, it’s saying that something is bad for you if it’s painful. In other words, if something is painful, that’s sufficient for it to be bad for you; painful things are always bad for you. Second, it’s saying that something is bad for you only if it’s painful. In other words, something’s being painful is necessary for it to be bad for you; non-painful things are never bad for you.
So, HD is saying that being painful is necessary and sufficient for being bad for you. Accordingly, it can be challenged in two different ways. First, you might try to show that being painful isn’t sufficient, by producing examples of things that are painful but aren’t bad for you. Second, you might try to show that being painful isn’t necessary, by producing examples of things that aren’t painful but that are still bad for you. An example of either sort would count as a counterexample to HD and would be enough to show that HD is incorrect. Can you think of one?
Argument by Analogy
Another common argumentative strategy is argument by analogy. We’ll encounter such arguments repeatedly in this book. Here is an example from 7 Against Prisons and Taxes, which is meant to show that it’s wrong for the government to tax and imprison its citizens:
Thinking about this scenario is meant to elicit the intuition that Jasmine is doing something wrong. But what Jasmine is doing seems entirely analogous to what the government does when it taxes and imprisons its citizens. If that’s right, then we should think that taxation and imprisonment by the government are wrong as well.
What really drives an argument by analogy isn’t so much the presence of similarities between the two cases being compared, but rather the absence of a certain kind of difference. With VIGILANTE, the idea is that there’s no morally relevant difference between what Jasmine does and what the government does, that is, no difference between them that could explain why the one is wrong while the other is okay. The argument can be framed as follows:
The idea behind TX1 is that, if one action is immoral and another isn’t, there has got to be some explanation for that, some difference between them that accounts for the moral difference. To put it another way, it would be arbitrary to hold that one action is right and another is wrong unless one can point to some difference between the actions to explain why they differ morally. TX2 is meant to strike you as obvious after reading the VIGILANTE case. And the idea behind TX3 is that there are no differences between what Jasmine does and what the government does that could make for a moral difference.
The challenge for those who don’t want to accept the conclusion of the argument, TX4, is to identify some morally relevant difference, and defenders of the argument must then either argue that the indicated differences aren’t morally relevant, or else modify the story so that the indicated differences are no longer present.
Thought Experiments
The VIGILANTE case is what’s called a thought experiment. In a thought experiment, a fictional scenario is presented—some more realistic than others—and then readers are asked for their intuitive reactions to the case. We’ll see many more examples throughout the book.
Thought experiments can be put to work in defending or challenging an argument in a number of different ways. We just saw how they can play a role in argument by analogy. They also often play a supporting role in arguments by counterexample. In 5 No Freedom, for instance, we’ll encounter the following argument for the idea that we sometimes do things of our own free will:
The second premise, FR2, says that so long as someone does what they decided to do, that by itself suffices for it to count as a free action. Later on, in 5 No Freedom, I try to cast doubt on this premise with the following thought experiment:
Colton did do exactly what he decided to do, namely tackle Kabir. But when we think about this case, it seems to us, intuitively, that Colton did not freely tackle Kabir; this isn’t something he did of his own free will. So HYPNOTIC DECISION looks to be a counterexample to FR2, which is reason to reject FR2 and think that the Argument for Freedom fails.
When it comes to thought experiments, the details matter, and the cases we’ll use in this book are carefully constructed with an eye to the work they’re intended to do. HYPNOTIC DECISION, for example, is carefully constructed to serve as a counterexample to FR2, and in order for it do so it’s crucial that Colton tackles Kabir as a result of Tia’s hypnotic suggestion.
At times, you might naturally wonder what happens if we vary the details of a case. For instance, you may wonder: what if Colton snaps out of Tia’s hypnotic control at the last second, but still decides to tackle Kabir? Well, that’s a different case. Let’s call it HYPNOTIC BREAK. HYPNOTIC BREAK isn’t a counterexample to FR2, since intuitively Colton is acting freely in this new case. But that doesn’t change the fact that the original case, HYPNOTIC DECISION, is a counterexample to FR2. And so long as there’s one counterexample to FR2, that’s enough to show that it’s false.
At times, you may find that the description of the thought experiment leaves out some important details, and you may be tempted to fill in the details in ways that make them more interesting. For instance, in 10 What Makes Things Right you’ll be asked whether Corrine did the right thing in the following case:
You might be tempted to ask, “what if the pledge master is Corrine’s brother?” or “what if he has the cure for cancer?”, turning the case into an exciting moral dilemma. And you may be frustrated and confused when your instructor insists upon a boring interpretation of the scenario, where the people on the tracks are all equally unremarkable people whom Corrine has never met. Understand the reason for this. To do their intended work to serve as clear counterexamples, for example, or as illuminating analogies—thought experiments often need to be boring. The more discussion-worthy they are, and the less obvious it is what we ought to say about them, the less able they are to serve their argumentative purpose.
After reading a few of the chapters, you might begin to get suspicious of all this reliance on thought experiments. In particular, you might wonder how purely fictional, unrealistic cases could be relevant to the questions we’re trying to answer. If a zoologist says that zebras have black and white stripes, it would be no objection to say that you can imagine a zebra with purple and orange stripes. Why, then, when a philosopher affirms FR2, is it supposed to be an objection that we can imagine a case (like HYPNOTIC DECISION) in which someone isn’t acting freely despite doing what they decided to do?
Here’s the difference. When a zoologist says that zebras have black and white stripes, she only means to be claiming that, normally, zebras are like this. Neither my imaginary purple and orange zebra, nor even actual albino zebras, are any objection to a claim like that. The philosopher, by contrast, means to be making a stronger claim. She isn’t just saying that, normally, people are acting freely when they do what they decide to do. Rather, she is saying that doing what one decides to do is what makes an action free, or that that’s just what it is for an action to be free. And a claim like that is true only if it is absolutely exceptionless, both in actual cases and in merely possible cases.
To see this, suppose I wanted to know what makes someone a bachelor. And suppose you reply: what makes someone a bachelor is that they are an unmarried man under eighty feet tall. That’s obviously a terrible account of what it is to be a bachelor. But why? All actual unmarried men under eighty feet tall are bachelors, and all actual bachelors are unmarried men under eighty feet tall. So, there are no actual counterexamples. Still, it’s clear that being under eighty feet tall isn’t required for being a bachelor; height has nothing to do with what makes someone a bachelor. The in-principle possibility of a ninety-foot-tall bachelor is enough to show that this is an unsatisfactory account of bachelorhood. Likewise, the mere possibility of doing what one decided to do without acting freely is enough to falsify a philosophical thesis about what makes actions free.
Why, though, do philosophers make such strong claims—especially if that opens them up to refutation by imaginary cases? The answer (at least in part) is that philosophers want the claims they defend to be definitive: they are trying to definitively settle the philosophical questions at issue. For instance, think about the Beating Heart Argument from Counterexamples, according to which the fact that something has a beating heart makes it wrong to kill that thing. Suppose, though, that this were put forward merely as a useful, but not exceptionless, rule of thumb: that it’s typically wrong to kill things with beating hearts. In that case, even if I could convince you beyond any doubt that it’s typically wrong to kill things with heartbeats and that six week-old embryos have a heartbeat, that would not yet settle the question of whether it’s wrong to kill them. After all, maybe embryos are one of the exceptions to the rule, one of the atypical cases where it’s okay to kill something that has a beating heart.
Philosophical principles would have no “bite” unless these are meant to be absolutely exceptionless. So, it is for good reason that philosophers are searching for absolutely exceptionless principles. But this is precisely what opens them up to refutation by thought experiments; one possible exception would be enough to show that the principle is false.
What is Philosophy?
As you can see, this book is going to cover a wide array of topics, including whether you should fear death, whether abortion is immoral, whether God exists, and whether we ever do things of our own free will. So, what do these topics all have in common, that makes them all philosophical topics?
It’s hard to say. Philosophy is sometimes characterized as the study of life’s most fundamental questions. That does capture some of the topics we’ll cover, like the true nature of morality and the existence of God. But the question of whether we should have to pay taxes hardly seems like one of “life’s most fundamental questions.” And other questions that we’d naturally describe as being among life’s most fundamental questions, like whether we’re alone in the universe or how many generations the human race has left, aren’t exactly philosophical. So, this won’t do as a definition of philosophy, since there are counterexamples: being one of life’s fundamental questions is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a philosophical topic.
Honestly, I’m not sure how to give necessary and sufficient conditions for a topic’s being philosophical. Philosophers have lots of interesting things to say about biology, physics, sociology, and psychology, and it can be difficult (and probably unnecessary) to say where the science ends and the philosophy begins.
Perhaps a more promising approach to saying what makes some inquiries and not others philosophical would be to look, not for what unites the topics studied, but rather at how they are studied. Philosophers try to answer questions and make sense of things just by thinking carefully about them, attempting to resolve controversial questions and assess challenges to commonsense assumptions using rational argumentation alone. (Though this doesn’t mean that philosophical argumentation can’t be informed by scientific discoveries and other worldly observations.) As Delia Graff Fara puts it,
By doing philosophy we can discover eternal and mind-independent truths about the nature of the world by investigating our own conceptions of it, and by subjecting our most commonly or firmly held beliefs to what would otherwise be perversely strict scrutiny. (Pyke 2011)
After finishing this book, I think you’ll have a pretty good sense of what Professor Fara means by “perversely strict scrutiny.” And I don’t think she meant this as a criticism. Done well, philosophy can sometimes feel like thinking in slow motion. Even when an idea or argument seems clear enough, philosophers like to break it down into its component parts; separate out all of the different premises and assess the plausibility of each individually; identify challenges to the premises and break them down into their component parts; see whether arguments can be strengthened by small changes to how they are formulated; and so on. Some things can only be figured out by paying the closest attention to the smallest details.
References
Sources and Resources
Every chapter of this book ends with a section of “Sources and Resources.” This is where I briefly explain where the arguments in the chapter came from, and offer suggestions for further exploration.
One useful resource is 1000 Word Philosophy, which offers accessible introductory articles covering a wide range of topics, all under 1000 words. For example, Metcalf (2020) is a short introductory overview of different views about what philosophy is. Some of the articles, including this one, are also presented in video form.
(Note that the “2020” in “Metcalf (2020)” is a link. Click on it (or hover over it) to access the the full reference, which includes a link the article.)
Another incredibly useful resource is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, with peer-reviewed overview articles covering a wide range of topics. These articles can be technical and challenging—they are pitched to advanced undergrads and grad students. For example, Brown and Fehige (2026) is an in-depth overview of philosophical work on thought experiments, and Devine and Lopez Frias (2023) is an overview of work on the philosophy of sport.
Philosophy Compass is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes opinionated accessible topical surveys. For example, Nguyen (2017), on the philosophy of games, Meskin (2011), on the philosophy of comics, and Marino (2014), on the philosophy of sex. (Yes, I picked those examples because I thought one of them might intrigue you enough that you’d follow the link.) Philosophy Compass requires a paid subscription. Our library has paid for this. Use the “Institutional Login” option to access the full text of these articles.
Wireless Philosophy is a curated collection of video lectures on a range of topics, pitched at a level appropriate to undergraduate courses. The videos at Crash Course Philosophy are pitched to a broader audience and go into less depth, but can be useful. Here is their video introducing philosophy as a subject:
For more serious research, you need a good searchable database. For philosophy, this is PhilPapers. Search a topic, and you will find more or less everything that has been written on that topic. If you are lucky, it will even include a link that gives you access.