19 topics
Philosophy help, one argument reconstructed at a time
"All fish can fly, and salmon are fish, so salmon can fly" is a perfectly valid argument. Noticing why that sentence is not a joke is the whole first month of a philosophy course, and students who never quite get it spend the rest of the year summarising what thinkers said instead of assessing whether their reasoning works.
Where students get stuck
Valid and sound keep swapping places in my head
Validity is about structure only, and it never looks at the world. An argument is valid when the conclusion could not be false if the premises were true, which is why the flying salmon argument above is valid despite being nonsense — its form is airtight and its first premise is simply false. Soundness adds the missing piece: an argument is sound when it is valid and its premises are actually true. This matters for essays because it tells you which of two attacks to make. If the structure leaks, attack the inference. If the structure holds, you have to attack a premise, and saying "I disagree with the conclusion" is not an available move.
I can't work out what the philosopher is actually claiming
Find the conclusion before you read anything else properly. Scan for the signposts — therefore, hence, thus, it follows that, so — and the sentence attached to one of them is usually the conclusion. Write it at the top of a page, then hunt backwards for the reasons offered for it, numbering them as premises. Most passages contain far less argument than text, and the rest is illustration, anticipation of objections or throat-clearing. When you reconstruct, apply the principle of charity: if a passage can be read as a weak argument or a strong one, take the strong one, because refuting a version the author never held earns nothing.
In ethics essays I just describe utilitarianism and then deontology
Description scores the lowest band, because the theories are only interesting where they disagree. Build your essay around a case that splits them. A surgeon could save five patients by taking the organs of one healthy visitor: act utilitarianism struggles to rule it out, since the arithmetic favours it, while a Kantian rules it out immediately because the visitor is being used purely as a means and the maxim cannot be universalised without collapsing. Then push on both. Rule utilitarianism answers that a society with organ-harvesting surgeons produces less utility overall; the Kantian has to explain conflicting duties. Marks come from working the disagreement, not from the summaries.
Descartes and scepticism feel like word games
They are more disciplined than they look. Descartes is not claiming the world is a dream; he is testing which beliefs can survive the strongest possible doubt, so he invents an evil demon precisely because it is the most extreme sceptical hypothesis available. Everything based on the senses falls, and so does mathematics under the demon. What survives is that something is doing the doubting, since a deceived thinker still has to exist to be deceived — that is the cogito. Notice its limits, which is where the marks sit: it establishes a thinking thing, not a body, not other minds and not the external world. Every later move in the Meditations is an attempt to win those back.
What's covered
Philosophy topics you can work through with a tutor, generate practice on, or turn into flashcards and a study plan.
Logic and argument
- Deductive and inductive reasoning
- Validity, soundness and argument reconstruction
- Formal fallacies and informal fallacies
- Propositional logic, truth tables and quantifiers
Ethics
- Utilitarianism: act, rule and the calculus of consequences
- Kantian deontology and the categorical imperative
- Virtue ethics and Aristotle's function argument
- Moral relativism and moral realism
- Applied ethics: medical, environmental and AI cases
Knowledge and reality
- Rationalism, empiricism and the sources of knowledge
- Justified true belief and the Gettier problem
- Scepticism and Descartes' method of doubt
- Free will, determinism and compatibilism
- Personal identity over time
Mind, religion and politics
- Dualism, physicalism and the hard problem of consciousness
- Arguments for and against the existence of God
- The problem of evil
- Social contract theory: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau
- Justice, liberty and Rawls' original position
Philosophy questions
Can it just tell me the right answer to an ethics question?
There usually is not one, and a marker knows that. What it will do is take the opposing position seriously and press you on it out loud, which is how you find out whether your view survives an objection or only survives silence. If your argument collapses in the conversation, that is a cheaper place to discover it than in an essay.
How do I handle the objection paragraph? Mine feel fake.
They feel fake because they are usually built from an objection nobody would raise. Ask for the strongest objection to your own thesis rather than a convenient one, then decide honestly whether you can answer it. Sometimes the right move is narrowing your thesis until you can, and that revision is worth more marks than a confident overreach.
I have to read a primary text and I do not understand a page of it.
Share the page on screen and read it a paragraph at a time out loud, stopping to reconstruct each one into numbered premises on the whiteboard. Primary philosophy is slow reading by design, and the pace that feels embarrassing is the correct pace.
Stuck on philosophy right now?
Talk it through out loud, share your screen, and watch it worked out step by step on a whiteboard.
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