Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
A free, peer-reviewed online encyclopedia of philosophy maintained by Stanford’s Metaphysics Research Lab at https://plato.stanford.edu/. Entries are written and revised by specialists and kept current: the standard first stop for any serious philosophy topic.
Unlike Wikipedia, each SEP entry is signed by an expert author, reviewed by an editorial board, and formally archived across versions. If I want the state of the art on a philosophical problem in one place, this is where I go.
Notes built from SEP entries
A running list of notes I’ve written whose skeleton comes from an SEP entry (the structure, positions, named proponents, and objections are SEP-sourced; the “My take” sections are mine).
Epistemology
- Problem of Induction: Hume’s challenge, and why no rescue fully works
- Gettier Problem: JTB dies; everything after tries to patch it
Philosophy of Mind
- Chinese Room: Searle’s case that syntax can’t produce semantics
- Philosophical Zombies: the conceivability argument against physicalism
Metaphysics
- Compatibilism: free will and determinism can coexist
- Personal Identity: psychological continuity, animalism, and Parfit’s fission
Ethics & Meta-Ethics
- Is-Ought Problem: Hume on the gap between fact and value
- Trolley Problem: Double Effect and why Footbridge feels different
- Moral Luck: the Control Principle vs. how we actually judge
Philosophy of Science
- Falsifiability: Popper’s demarcation criterion and its critics
Why the “My take” pattern
SEP entries are encyclopedic by design: they survey positions without taking sides. That’s exactly what I want from the reference, but it’s not how I want my own notes to read. So every SEP-sourced note here has a My take section where I work out where I actually land against my existing commitments in Truth, Belief, Hume on Causation, Mary’s Room, Ethics, etc.
The notes are SEP-sourced in their skeleton (what the problem is, who said what, what the responses are). The opinions are mine.
Entries I want to write next
Rough queue, not a commitment:
- Vagueness / Sorites Paradox: pairs with Three-Valued Logic
- Newcomb’s Problem: decision theory puzzle
- Veil of Ignorance / Rawls: my political-philosophy gap
- Pascal’s Wager: decision theory + epistemology
- Problem of Evil: the classical case against theism