Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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Philosophy and the Arts: A Textbook with Readings
Theodore Gracyk · Minnesota State Colleges and Universities · 2025
This book is an introduction to some influential theories in philosophy of art. It combines excerpts of historically important texts from European and American culture with explanations of the key ideas in those texts. The most recent of these texts dates from 1929.The overall organization is topical. Five topics have been selected. The chapters are relatively independent of one another and can be approached in any order.
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Learning from Arguments: An Introduction to Philosophy
Daniel Korman · PhilPapers Foundation · 2022
Learning from Arguments is a novel approach to teaching Introduction to Philosophy. It advances accessible versions of key philosophical arguments, in a form that students can emulate in their own writing, and with the primary aim of cultivating an understanding of the dynamics of philosophical argumentation. The book contains ten core chapters, covering the problem of evil, Pascal’s wager, personal identity, the irrationality of fearing death, free will and determinism, Cartesian skepticism, the problem of induction, the problem of political authority, the violinist argument, the future-like-ours argument, the ethics of eating meat, utilitarianism (both act and rule), and the trolley problem. Additionally, there is an introductory chapter explaining what arguments are and surveying some common argumentative strategies, an appendix on logic explaining the mechanics and varieties of valid arguments, and an appendix providing detailed advice for writing philosophy papers. Each of the ten core chapters offers a sustained argument for some controversial thesis, specifically written for an audience of beginners. The aim is to introduce newcomers to the dynamics of philosophical argumentation, using some of the arguments standardly covered in an introductory philosophy course, but without the additional hurdles one encounters when reading the primary sources of the arguments: challenging writing, specialized jargon, and references to unfamiliar books, philosophers, or schools of thought.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics
George Matthews; Christina Hendricks · Rebus Community · 2019
We often make judgments about good and bad, right and wrong. Philosophical ethics is the critical examination of these and other concepts central to how we evaluate our own and each others’ behavior and choices. This text examines some of the main threads of discussion on these topics that have developed over the last couple of millenia, mostly within the Western cultural tradition. It considers basic questions about moral and ethical judgment: Is there such a thing as something that is really right or really wrong independent of time, place and perspective? What is the relationship between religion and ethics? How can we reconcile self-interest and ethics? Is it ever acceptable to harm one person in order to help others? What do recent discussions in evolutionary biology or have to say about human moral systems? What is the relation between gender and ethics? The authors invite you to participate in their exploration of these and many other questions in philosophical ethics.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind
Multiple Contributors · Rebus Community · 2019
Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Mind surveys the central themes in philosophy of mind and places them in a historical and contemporary context intended to engage first-time readers in the field. It focuses on debates about the status and character of the mind and its seemingly subjective nature in an apparently more objective world.
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Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy
Catherine Wilson · Open Book Publishers · 2016
Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint addresses in a novel format the major topics and themes of contemporary metaethics, the study of the analysis of moral thought and judgement. Metathetics is less concerned with what practices are right or wrong than with what we mean by ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Looking at a wide spectrum of topics including moral language, realism and anti-realism, reasons and motives, relativism, and moral progress, this book engages students and general readers in order to enhance their understanding of morality and moral discourse as cultural practices. Catherine Wilson innovatively employs a first-person narrator to report step-by-step an individual’s reflections, beginning from a position of radical scepticism, on the possibility of objective moral knowledge. The reader is invited to follow along with this reasoning, and to challenge or agree with each major point. Incrementally, the narrator is led to certain definite conclusions about ‘oughts’ and norms in connection with self-interest, prudence, social norms, and finally morality. Scepticism is overcome, and the narrator arrives at a good understanding of how moral knowledge and moral progress are possible, though frequently long in coming.Accessibly written, Metaethics from a First Person Standpoint presupposes no prior training in philosophy and is a must-read for philosophers, students and general readers interested in gaining a better understanding of morality as a personal philosophical quest.
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Introduction to Philosophy
Sondra Peron · ROTEL · 2025
This Introduction to Philosophy: An Anthology is a collection of essential readings from a wide variety of contemporary writers and philosophers designed to help students unfamiliar with philosophy understand that they know more than they think. This OER asks students to think about how they think and how they know what they know. Students will start by challenging assumptions and flexing those critical thinking skills we all have—not just in an abstract way but in a practical, everyday way. Students will explore the branches of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.
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Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art: Towards Theory and Practice
Peggy Karpouzou; Nikoleta Zampaki · Peter Lang · 2023
Through the burgeoning fields of Posthumanities and Environmental Humanities, this edition examines the changing conception of human subjectivity, agency, and citizenship as shaped by the dynamic interplays between nature, technology, science, and culture. The proposed ‘symbiotic turn’, (the awareness of the multitude of interactions and mutual interdependencies among humans, non-humans and their environment) aspires to explore the complex recompositions of the “human” in the 21st century. By organizing and promoting interdisciplinary dialogue at multiple levels, both in theory and practice, Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies is suggested as a new narrative about the biosphere and technosphere, which is embodied literarily, philosophically, and artistically.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Aesthetic Theory and Practice
Yuriko Saito ; Ruth Sonderegger ; Ines Kleesattel · Rebus Community · 2021
Aesthetic Theory and Practice offers fresh perspectives on canonical and emerging topics in aesthetics, and also brings attention to a number of culturally sensitive topics that are customarily silenced in introductions to philosophical aesthetics. The papers are heterogeneous in terms of length and degrees of difficulty, inviting the reader into the study of contemporary aesthetics, which spans a lifetime.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology
Brian Barnett; Christina Hendricks · Rebus Community · 2021
Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology engages first-time philosophy readers on a guided tour through the core concepts, questions, methods, arguments, and theories of epistemology—the branch of philosophy devoted to the study of knowledge. The book progresses systematically while placing key ideas and thinkers in historical and contemporary context. Central topics include the analysis of knowledge, the nature of epistemic justification, rationalism vs. empiricism, skepticism, the value of knowledge, the ethics of belief, Bayesian epistemology, social epistemology, and feminist epistemologies.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion
Beau Branson; Christina Hendricks · Rebus Community · 2020
Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion introduces some of the major traditional arguments for and against the existence of God, as well as some less well-known, but thought-provoking arguments for the existence of God, and one of the most important new challenges to religious belief from the Cognitive Science of Religion. An introductory chapter traces the connection between philosophy and religion throughout Western history, and a final chapter addresses the place of non-Western and non-monotheistic religions within contemporary philosophy of religion.
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Introduction to Philosophy: Logic
Ben Martin; Christina Hendricks · Rebus Community · 2020
Introduction to Philosophy: Logic provides students with the concepts and skills necessary to identify and evaluate arguments effectively. The chapters, all written by experts in the field, provide an overview of what arguments are, the different types of arguments one can expect to encounter in both philosophy and everyday life, and how to recognise common argumentative mistakes.
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An Introduction to Philosophy
Russ Payne · BCcampus · 2023
The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, the goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. Traditional theories of right action is covered in a third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so. The end of the ethics sequence addresses social justice, what it is for one's community to be good. Our sphere of concern expands progressively through these chapters. Our inquiry recapitulates the course of development into moral maturity. Over the course of the text, the author has tried to outline the continuity of thought that leads from the historical roots of philosophy to a few of the diverse areas of inquiry that continue to make significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
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Words of Wisdom: Intro to Philosophy
Jody Ondich · Jody Ondich · 2018
Words of Wisdom can come from anyone. In this text we discuss topics ranging from "Are Humans good by nature?" to "Is there a God?" to "Do I have the right to my own opinion?" Philosophy is the study of wisdom, and can emerge in our conversations in social media, in school, around the family dinner table, and even in the car. The text uses materials that are 2,500 years old, and materials that were in the news this year. Wise people come in all shapes and types, and from every culture on earth. We have poetry and folktales, sacred writings and letters. Dialogues and interviews, news columns, Ted Talks, You Tube recordings and even comedy are all a part of the content in this text.You will be most successful reading this on line. The formatting in the downloadable versions is not wonderful. There is work being done by the software, but in the meantime, you will want to use it by clicking here on "read book:".
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Modern Philosophy
Walter Ott · BCcampus · 2013
This is a textbook in modern philosophy. It combines readings from primary sources with two pedagogical tools. Paragraphs in italics introduce figures and texts. Numbered study questions (also in italics) ask students to reconstruct an argument or position from the text, or draw connections among the readings. And I have added an introductory chapter (Chapter 0 – Minilogic and Glossary), designed to present the basic tools of philosophy and sketch some principles and positions. The immediate goal is to encourage students to grapple with the ideas rather than passing their eyes over the texts. This makes for a better classroom experience and permits higher-level discussions. Another goal is to encourage collaboration among instructors, as they revise and post their own versions of the book.
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Memory & Cognition
Priyanka Mehta · University of Wisconsin System · 2026
Memory & Cognition offers a fresh, engaging tour of how the mind works—spanning the brain, mental imagery, the different functions of memory, and decision‑making. Blending psychology with neuroscience, computer science, sociology, and philosophy, the book grounds concepts in real‑life examples and uses experimental evidence, diagrams, and hypothetical scenarios to introduce complex topics to readers. Memory & Cognition is a concise, interdisciplinary guide for anyone curious about how we think, remember, and make decisions.
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Developing Human Potential: A Personal Approach to Leadership
Gina Matkin; Jason Headrick; Hannah Sunderman · University of Nebraska Pressbooks · 2023
This Online Educational Resource (OER) textbook provides an overview and introduction to personal leadership through the lens of how students can develop and maximize their own interpersonal skills. Interpersonal skills are crucial to navigating the professional world and can help us to better understand ourselves. This textbook approaches interpersonal skills from a personal level and allows the reader to immerse themselves into activities and scholarship across topical areas. Through the text, learners can create their own Personal Leadership Philosophy and expand this into a Civic Leadership Philosophy to help them understand the impact leaders can have on their communities and workplaces.
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Conflict, War and Revolution: the problem of politics in international political thought
Paul Kelly · LSE Press · 2022
Violence and war were ubiquitous features of politics long before the emergence of the modern state system. Since the late 18th century major revolutions across the world have further challenged the idea of the state as a final arbiter of international order. This book discusses ten major thinkers who have questioned and re-shaped how we think about politics, violence and relations between states – Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Clausewitz, Lenin and Mao, and Schmitt. Conflict, war and revolution have generally been seen in political thought as problems to be managed by stable domestic political communities. In different ways, all the paradigmatic thinkers here acknowledge them instead as inevitable dimensions of human experience, manifested through different ways of acting politically – while yet offering radically distinct answers about how they can be handled. This book dramatically broadens the canon of political thought by considering perspectives on the international system that challenge its historical inevitability and triumph. Drawing on history, theology, and law as well as philosophy, Paul Kelly introduces thinkers who challenge fundamentally the ways in which we should think about the nature and scope of political institutions and agents. He illuminates many troubling contemporary conflicts with a critical and historical perspective. This book is primarily intended for second year and upwards undergraduate students in general political theory and international theory, and advanced international relations students. Each chapter is also downloadable on its own for use in courses considering only some of the ten theorists covered. Written in an accessible way Conflict, War and Revolution will also interest advanced general readers with interests in the historical thought underpinnings of political ideas and today’s international politics.
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Political Ideologies and Worldviews: An Introduction
Valérie Vézina; Alexandra Taylor · Kwantlen Polytechnic University · 2023
Political Ideologies and Worldviews: An Introduction 2nd edition takes a “pluralist” approach and, in addition to being the first open textbook on its subject, also pushes back against the Eurocentric tendencies of standard textbooks by including chapters on Indigenous worldviews and Confucianism. Providing the latest scholarship on “classical ideologies” (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism, etc.), the textbook also includes innovative chapters on populism, feminism, and multiculturalism, as well as looking at the future of ideologies in a globalized world. Joining together scholars from Canada and beyond, the text also contains discussion questions to help students and readers to think further. This new edition features more text breaks, images, tables and exercises throughout the chapters, making it even more interactive and accessible. This open textbook will be a great asset for introductory courses at the college and university levels on political ideologies and political thought and philosophy, but could also be used in other disciplines, as each chapter assesses the state of the ideology in today’s world. The general reader looking for a better understanding of the competing ideological currents of our time – currents which flow into our daily political debates and real-life government decisions – will also greatly benefit from this book.
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Key Elements of Green Chemistry
Lucian Lucia · A.T. Still University · 2018
Green chemistry, in addition to being a science, it is also a philosophy and nearly a religion. Attendance at American Chemical Society Green Chemistry & Engineering Conferences will instill such an ideal into any attendant because of the nearly universal appeal and possibilities in this novel approach to radicalizing the business of doing science and engineering.
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Mind, Body, World: Foundations of Cognitive Science
Michael Dawson · Athabasca University Press · 2013
Cognitive science arose in the 1950s when it became apparent that a number of disciplines, including psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, were fragmenting. Perhaps owing to the field's immediate origins in cybernetics, as well as to the foundational assumption that cognition is information processing, cognitive science initially seemed more unified than psychology. However, as a result of differing interpretations of the foundational assumption and dramatically divergent views of the meaning of the term information processing, three separate schools emerged: classical cognitive science, connectionist cognitive science, and embodied cognitive science. Examples, cases, and research findings taken from the wide range of phenomena studied by cognitive scientists effectively explain and explore the relationship among the three perspectives. Intended to introduce both graduate and senior undergraduate students to the foundations of cognitive science, Mind, Body, World addresses a number of questions currently being asked by those practicing in the field: What are the core assumptions of the three different schools? What are the relationships between these different sets of core assumptions? Is there only one cognitive science, or are there many different cognitive sciences? Giving the schools equal treatment and displaying a broad and deep understanding of the field, Dawson highlights the fundamental tensions and lines of fragmentation that exist among the schools and provides a refreshing and unifying framework for students of cognitive science.