What Each Major Knows III
30 pieces · 7.2 hours of reading
Logic & Argument: Why the Conclusion Follows, or Doesn’t
Logic is the study of one thing: when the truth of some claims forces the truth of another. A graduate learns to see that shape under every argument, and to test it by hunting for a single counterexample.
ReadInteractive13 min02Ethics: Five Ways to Answer “What Should I Do?”
Every moral argument quietly runs on a principle: count the results, keep the rules, be the right kind of person, look after the people near you, or act on terms nobody could reasonably refuse. A graduate learns to name the principle, and to see what it costs.
ReadInteractive14 min03Epistemology: What Knowing Is, and When a Belief Is Earned
You know your own birthday, that the Earth is old, and that you are not dreaming right now (or do you?). Epistemology asks what separates knowing from lucky guessing, where good reasons come from, and how strongly to believe things.
Deep diveInteractive15 min04Metaphysics: What Stays the Same When Everything Changes
Replace every plank of a ship and ask whether it is the same ship; replace every cell of a body and ask the same of a person. Metaphysics is the study of what such questions assume: things, selves, causes, time, and the edges of words like “heap”.
Deep diveInteractive17 min05Philosophy of Mind: Why There Is Something It Is Like
A brain is wet tissue obeying chemistry, and yet it comes with a point of view. Philosophy of mind asks how those two descriptions fit together, and whether anything else, an octopus, a program, a language model, could have one.
Deep diveInteractive15 min06Philosophy of Science: What Makes Science Science
Science is the most reliable way people have found to learn about the world, and nobody has produced a rule that says exactly why. Philosophy of science is the attempt, and its best arguments are now being tested in real laboratories.
Deep diveInteractive15 min07Philosophy of Language: What Words Mean and What They Do
"The Morning Star is the Evening Star" told astronomers something. "The Morning Star is the Morning Star" told them nothing. Yet both name the same planet. A century of philosophy grew from that puzzle, and from the stranger fact that we mean far more than we say.
ReadInteractive14 min08Ancient & Medieval Philosophy: The Questions Before the Questions
Two thousand years, three continents and at least four languages. Almost every move later philosophers make (that reality is not what it seems, that argument can settle things, that reason and faith must be reconciled) was first made here, mostly by people who disagreed fiercely.
ReadInteractive12 min09Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Nietzsche
In 1641 a French soldier-turned-thinker tried to doubt everything and found one thing left. Over the next 250 years a chain of replies (some from princesses and duchesses nobody put in the textbooks) turned that single point into the problems we still use: mind and body, cause and effect, freedom, and what we can know at all.
ReadInteractive12 min10Chinese & Indian Philosophy: Old Argument Cultures, Read as Philosophy
Two civilisations where people argued about human nature, knowledge, causation and the self for two and a half thousand years, with premises, objections, replies and rival schools. Here they are as philosophy, not as a mood of ancient wisdom.
Deep diveInteractive17 min11Islamic, African & Latin American Philosophy: Arguments With the Ancients and With Power
A philosopher in Baghdad asks what is left of you when your senses are gone. One in Córdoba defends reason against the man who said fire does not burn. One in a Mexican convent asks to be allowed to read. These are three traditions that were pushed to the edge of the standard syllabus, and they ask questions every course asks.
Deep diveInteractive17 min12Contemporary Philosophy: Analytic, Continental & Beyond
The twentieth century began with a hope that logic could clean up philosophy and ended with philosophers still arguing about almost everything. What changed, what split, what crossed over, and what a 2020 survey says the profession now thinks.
Deep diveInteractive16 min13Earth Systems: Five Spheres, One Slow Machine
The planet is not a rock with weather on it. It is a set of reservoirs of air, water, ice, rock and life, joined by flows that run at speeds from days to hundreds of millions of years. Earth-system science is the habit of asking: how big is the pool, how fast does it turn over, and what else is wired to it?
Deep diveInteractive15 min14Climate Science: A Heat Balance Sheet for the Planet
A climate scientist keeps one ledger: energy in from the Sun, energy out as infrared, and what the difference does to the temperature. Nearly everything in the field, from the greenhouse effect to the carbon budget, is that ledger with more detail.
ReadInteractive13 min15Conservation & Applied Ecology: What Counts as Saving Nature
Everyone agrees nature should be saved. The course is about the harder questions: saved from what, measured how, protected where, and by whom.
ReadInteractive13 min16Energy Systems & Transitions: What a Kilowatt-Hour Really Costs
Changing the world's energy is not one problem but four: what we burn and generate, what it costs, whether it is there at 7 p.m. on a still winter night, and how fast any of it can be built. The subject is the habit of keeping all four in view at once.
ReadInteractive14 min17Pollution & Environmental Health: The Dose, the Plume and the Count
Pollution is a dose delivered to people. Learn how a dose becomes a harm, how a chimney becomes a concentration, and how anyone counts the dead, and most of the argument becomes readable.
Deep diveInteractive15 min18Soils, Agriculture & Food Systems: Feeding Eight Billion From a Thin Skin of Earth
Almost every calorie you eat passed through a few centimetres of soil, a bag of nitrogen made from air, and a decision about how to use the land. This is the course that follows the food back to those three things.
Deep diveInteractive18 min19Environmental Economics & Policy: Putting a Price on What Nobody Was Charged For
Smoke, carbon and noisy neighbours share one economic problem: someone pays a cost that never appears on a bill. Economists have a toolkit for it, an argument about how to use it, and a few numbers that decide a lot.
Deep diveInteractive16 min20Environmental Data & GIS: Reading the Planet from Orbit
A satellite never sees a forest. It sees numbers: how much light of each colour came back from a square of ground. Turning those numbers into a map, a trend and an honest error bar is a craft with its own traps.
ReadInteractive13 min21Phonetics and Phonology: The Sounds You Never Knew You Were Choosing
Every language uses a few dozen sounds out of the hundred-odd a human mouth can make, and its speakers stop hearing the difference between the ones their language ignores. Phonetics measures the sounds; phonology finds the system behind them.
ReadInteractive12 min22Morphology: How Words Are Built
English builds "unbreakableness" from four pieces and Turkish builds "from your houses" from four more, in a single word. Morphology is the study of those pieces, and of the surprisingly different ways languages put them together.
ReadInteractive11 min23Syntax: Sentences Are Trees, Not Strings
You hear a sentence one word at a time, but you understand it as nested groups. Syntax is the study of those groups, the rules that build them, and the long argument over where the rules come from.
ReadInteractive13 min24Semantics & Pragmatics: What Is Said and What Is Meant
A sentence has a meaning that comes from its words. A speaker adds a meaning that comes from the occasion. Learning to pull those two apart is most of the subject.
ReadInteractive12 min25Historical Linguistics: Sound Laws and the Family Trees They Draw
How a handful of regular sound changes let us read languages nobody has spoken for six thousand years, and what happens when the evidence runs out.
Deep diveInteractive17 min26Sociolinguistics: Nobody Speaks Just the Language
Every speaker speaks a particular variety, to a particular person, in a particular mood. Sociolinguistics measures that variation, finds the rules in it, and asks who gets to call what "correct."
ReadInteractive13 min27Language Acquisition: How Children Build a Language
Every typical child does something no adult can easily match, and the argument over how is one of the oldest in the cognitive sciences.
Deep diveInteractive16 min28Psycholinguistics & the Brain: How a Mind Handles a Sentence
In under half a second you recognise a word, guess the next one and sometimes get led up the garden path. The classic brain map of it is now being redrawn.
Deep diveInteractive16 min29Languages of the World: Seven Thousand Answers to the Same Problem
Every human community solved the problem of talking to each other, and no two solved it the same way. Typology is the science of how many different solutions there are, which ones go together, and which ones are about to vanish.
ReadInteractive13 min30Computational Linguistics: From Grammars to Language Models
Teaching machines to handle language began with hand-written rules, moved to counting, and now rests on neural networks trained on a large share of the written web. Each stage learned something about language. What the latest stage proves is still argued.
Deep diveInteractive16 min