Introduction to Philosophy
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This is a complete course: fifteen instructional weeks and a finals week, every student component, built with The Course Maker and ready to import. Weeks are relative (Week 1 to Week 16); you set the dates when you import it. Browse the whole thing below. Click any piece to read it in full, then click back to return here.
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This course is free, complete, and evergreen, and it is yours to keep; free downloads run through June 30, 2028. Students pay $0 for course materials: the readings and videos are links to freely available resources.
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What the paid build adds
This sample is complete and yours to keep. A paid build is the same course made yours in the ways a download cannot be:
- Every date set to your term and your breaks, and re-paced to a second campus calendar at no extra charge.
- Your syllabus, your policies, and your outline of record in the build, with an alignment report that shows which component addresses each objective and SLO, and a Universal design for learning section drawn from the course's own data.
- Your name on every page as the course's creator.
- Kept current every term: fresh assessment variants, every link re-checked and the dead ones replaced, and the subject brought up to date where it has moved.
- The full instructor pack: answer keys and worked solutions, the alignment report, and the UDL map.
- A record for your college's file: the design attestation, a disclosure statement for every edition, and what changed at the end of each term.
Included in every course
ChapterRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a chapter to read, a slide deck with speaker notes, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Slide deck with speaker notesRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — a slide deck with speaker notes, a chapter to read, and captioned videos — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee.
Captioned video linksRequired
Required in every course. Every module presents the same content in three ways — captioned videos, a chapter to read, and a slide deck with speaker notes — so each student can choose how to take it in. The course is designed to reflect UDL's multiple means of representation, and the alignment report describes this to your curriculum committee. We link videos only when a caption track exists (from the creator or generated automatically), and we never host them.
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Policies, schedule, and grading
Assignment groups & weights
Configured in the export — the gradebook is set the moment the course is imported.
| Assignment group | Weight | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorials & Practice | 10% | |
| Quizzes | 10% | |
| Workshops | 20% | |
| Assignments | 25% | |
| Discussions | 15% | |
| Exams | 20% | |
| Total | 100% | Letter Standard |
What students will be able to do
Explain what philosophy is, name its main branches, and describe the Socratic practice of examining beliefs through questioning and argument.
Identify arguments, put them in standard form, judge whether they are valid, sound, or inductively strong, and test claims with counterexamples and thought experiments.
Explain central positions in metaphysics and epistemology — Plato's Forms, rationalism and empiricism, skepticism, and the analysis of knowledge — and evaluate the arguments for them.
Compare positions on the mind-body problem, personal identity, and free will, and evaluate them with the thought experiments that test them.
Evaluate the classic arguments for and against the existence of God and the relationship between faith and reason.
Explain and apply the major ethical theories — utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, virtue ethics, and social contract theory — and the challenges of relativism and egoism, to moral cases.
Compare social contract theories and theories of justice and liberty, from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to Mill, Rawls, and Nozick.
Describe central ideas of Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, and ubuntu philosophy, and compare them with the European tradition without ranking.
Explain existentialist and other answers to the question of life's meaning, and write a reasoned position on a philosophical question that answers the strongest objection to it.
Argument analysis — reconstruct a philosophical argument in standard form, judge its validity and the plausibility of its premises, and test it with a counterexample or a thought experiment, stating the result in one plain sentence.
Fair interpretation and accurate sourcing — state a position as its strongest defenders would, attribute every view, work, and thought experiment correctly, quote only from a verified text, and check any claim about a philosopher, including AI output, against the source.
How this course is built — read this first
Every teaching module carries the same set, in the order a student meets it: a Start Here overview, the chapter (the primary reading), the lecture (titled “Lecture: <module title>”), the slide deck with speaker notes, readings & resources (links only), the lecture tutorial and practice exercises worked with an AI tutor, the quiz, the discussion and the assignment, and the weekly Philosophy Workshop. Exams: the midterm in Week 8 and the final in Week 16, a finals week with no module.
The discussion and the assignment each ship in both formats: the adaptive version is the published, graded item, and its traditional alternative (no AI) is a separate item that ships unpublished beside it. An instructor who prefers the traditional format publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one.
What you see here is every student page. The instructor pack (answer keys and worked solutions, rubric calibration, image prompts, audio-brief scripts, and the alignment report) ships only in the download, never on this site.
Discussions & assignments: both formats in every module
Same learning objective either way; what changes is how the work happens.
Work it through with an approved chatbot
The student does the work in a guided conversation with an approved chatbot, using a copy-paste prompt the course provides. For a discussion, the AI is a Socratic partner that challenges their thinking and never writes the post. For an assignment, the AI is a coach: it asks questions, checks the reasoning shown, and waits for the student to revise. The student submits the chat link with the required summary or report.
The familiar way, one click away
The student does the work themselves and submits it, and the instructor grades it against the rubric. No AI required. It ships unpublished, opening with a one-line note to the instructor; publish it instead of the adaptive version if you prefer.
Every week, every component
Each week is a heading; every component under it links to the full student page. Week 8 is a teaching module that also carries the midterm bundle; Week 16 is the finals week, with the final exam bundle and no module.
What Philosophy Is: Socrates and the Examined Life
Arguments and Thought Experiments
Plato: Reality and the Forms
Knowledge I: Doubt, Reason, and Experience
Knowledge II: What Knowledge Is
The Mind-Body Problem
Personal Identity and Free Will
Midterm Review & Exam
The midterm exam bundle