Week 2 · Readings & resources

Week 2 — Readings & Resources

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Your primary reading is Chapter 2 (in this module). Everything below is the optional, go-deeper layer — pick what helps, skip the rest.

How to use this page

This page has 10 items (4 readings and 6 videos). Allow 63–76 minutes for everything. Each group points back to the matching chapter section and class-session segment, so use the full menu when you want more depth, or take the quick path below.

Every video here has captions: turn them on with the CC button in the player. The chapter covers the same ideas in text.

Pick-one quick path (20–23 min total)

① Valid, sound, and strong: what makes reasons work

Chapter 2, Section “Validity and soundness: does the shape lock in the claim?” · Session 1, Segment 2, “Validity, soundness, and the valid forms” · Remember: valid means the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true, and sound means valid with all premises true.

Arguments: Why Do You Believe What You Believe? — 1000-Word Philosophy — a short essay that defines an argument as premises offered for a conclusion, then separates valid arguments from strong ones and sound arguments from cogent ones, with playful examples. It uses "strong" and "cogent" where the chapter says inductively strong; the ideas line up. (reading, 5–8 min)
Validity and Soundness — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — a reference article that shows two arguments with the same valid form and two with the same invalid form, so you can see that validity depends on form and not on topic. Read the opening part on validity, soundness, and form; the later remarks on artificial languages and mathematical logic go beyond this week. (reading, 8–12 min)
Master Valid vs. Invalid Arguments (Never Get Confused Again) — Let's Get Logical — a five-minute explainer that keeps truth and validity apart: truth belongs to statements and validity to arguments, so it shows an invalid argument built from true statements and a valid one in which every statement is false. It then defines a valid argument as one where the premises cannot be true while the conclusion is false, and tests the idea with a shell game whose reasoning has the shape of disjunctive syllogism. It leaves soundness for another video, so use the chapter's definition for that step. Use it while working through the Week-2 module overview. (video, 5 min) (captions: creator)
How to Argue - Philosophical Reasoning: Crash Course Philosophy #2 — CrashCourse — after an opening on Plato's parts of the soul that goes beyond this week, the episode tells the barber puzzle and then explains premises, deduction, validity, and soundness, including an invalid argument that ends "I'm a cat". It says Russell came up with the puzzle and offers its own account of what he meant; the course says only that the puzzle is usually associated with him, so treat that account as the video's own. (video, 10 min) (captions: creator)

② Shapes that leak: invalid forms and counterexamples

Chapter 2, Section “Invalid forms and counterexamples: show the shape is broken” · Session 1, Segment 3, “Invalid forms and counterexamples” · Remember: a form is invalid when a case with the same form has true premises and a false conclusion.

Denying the Antecedent — Carneades.org — a ninety-second explainer of the invalid form if P then Q; not P; so not Q, shown with three everyday counterexamples: an umbrella someone carries whether or not it rains, a house that is stable because it is built of steel rather than brick, and a good mood with some other cause. It calls the form a formal fallacy and the opposite of affirming the consequent, which is another name for the chapter's backward form; its closing remarks on the channel's daily series go beyond this week. The automatic captions mishear the channel's name. (video, 2 min) (captions: automatic)
Counterexamples (Intro to Logic) — Philologick — a whiteboard lesson on building a counterexample: write down the argument's form, then fill it with simple content that makes the premises true and the conclusion false. Its advice to keep counterexamples simple matches the chapter's dog-and-cat example. The automatic captions spell the channel name oddly. (video, 10 min) (captions: automatic)

③ Testing ideas: induction, thought experiments, and charity

Chapter 2, Section “Thought experiments: the barber puzzle as a reductio” · Session 2, Segment 2, “Thought experiments and the barber puzzle” · Remember: a thought experiment tests an idea with an imagined case, and the barber puzzle shows that a description can sound fine and still be impossible.

Barber paradox — Wikipedia — a short encyclopedia page that walks both cases of the barber puzzle to a contradiction and concludes that no such barber can exist. Its History section tells its own story about how the puzzle came to be linked with Russell; skip the section on first-order logic. (reading, 3–5 min)
How to Argue - Induction & Abduction: Crash Course Philosophy #3 — CrashCourse — watch the first part on inductive reasoning, where examples such as a pain reliever and a film series show conclusions that are likely rather than guaranteed, and the later part on answering an argument with a counterargument. The grue puzzle and abduction go beyond this week, and treat its story about Socrates' beard as the video's own anecdote. This builds on Week 1's Socratic method of testing a claim with a counterexample. (video, 10 min) (captions: creator)
The Principle of Charity (Ninety Second Philosophy) — Carneades.org — a quick explainer on assuming your opponent is making the strongest argument, with a garbled argument about mortality repaired by fixing a reversed premise and adding a missing one. The automatic captions mishear the channel's name. (video, 2 min) (captions: automatic)

Optional one-stop reference (free online reference)

Thought Experiments, section 1: Important Characteristics of Thought Experiments — online Encyclopedia of Philosophy (reference entry) — read section 1 for how a thought experiment imagines a scenario, runs it, and draws a conclusion, and why the results can be fallible; skip the later debates about how thought experiments give knowledge. Stop here before the entry's history of thought experiments; next week takes up Plato's theory of Forms. (reading, 8–12 min)

Heads-up (links rot): these point to outside sites that occasionally move or rename pages. If a link ever fails, tell your instructor and use the reference above in the meantime.

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