College of Humanities & Social Sciences - Open & Free Materials by Course: Philosophy

Designed to meet the scope and sequence of your course, Introduction to Philosophy surveys logic, metaphysics, epistemology, theories of value, and history of philosophy thematically. Diverse primary sources and examples are central to the design, and the text emphasizes engaged reading, critical thinking, research, and analytical skill-building through guided activities.

• Instructor Resources
• Open License: CC-BY

The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, the goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. Traditional theories of right action is covered in a third of these.

• Open License: CC-BY-NC

This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. The goal of the textbook is to provide the reader with a set of tools and skills that will enable them to identify and evaluate arguments. The book is intended for an introductory course that covers both formal and informal logic. As such, it is not a formal logic textbook, but is closer to what one would find marketed as a “critical thinking textbook.”

• Open License: CC-BY-NC-SA

Introduction to Philosophy: Logic provides students with the concepts and skills necessary to identify and evaluate arguments effectively. The chapters, all written by experts in the field, provide an overview of what arguments are, the different types of arguments one can expect to encounter in both philosophy and everyday life, and how to recognise common argumentative mistakes.

• Open License: CC-BY

A Concise Introduction to Logic is an introduction to formal logic suitable for undergraduates taking a general education course in logic or critical thinking, and is accessible and useful to any interested in gaining a basic understanding of logic. This text takes the unique approach of teaching logic through intellectual history; the author uses examples from important and celebrated arguments in philosophy to illustrate logical principles. The text also includes a basic introduction to findings of advanced logic. As indicators of where the student could go next with logic, the book closes with an overview of advanced topics, such as the axiomatic method, set theory, Peano arithmetic, and modal logic. Throughout, the text uses brief, concise chapters that readers will find easy to read and to review.

• Open License: CC-BY-NC-SA

Introductory logic textbook that students can access for free. The book differs from other standard logic textbooks in its reliance on fun, low-stakes examples involving dinosaurs, a dog and his friends, etc.

• Open License: CC-BY-NC-ND

Introductory textbook in formal logic. It covers translation, proofs, and formal semantics for sentential and predicate logic.

• Open License: CC-BY

This is a textbook (or better, a workbook) in modern philosophy combining readings from primary sources with two pedagogical tools. Paragraphs in italics introduce figures and texts. Numbered study questions ask students to reconstruct an argument or position from the text, or draw connections among the readings. An introductory chapter is designed to present the basic tools of philosophy and sketch some principles and positions. The immediate goal is to encourage students to grapple with the ideas rather than passing their eyes over the texts.

• Open License: CC-BY-NC-SA

Aesthetic Theory and Practice offers fresh perspectives on canonical and emerging topics in aesthetics, and also brings attention to a number of culturally sensitive topics that are customarily silenced in introductions to philosophical aesthetics. The papers are heterogeneous in terms of length and degrees of difficulty, inviting the reader into the study of contemporary aesthetics, which spans a lifetime.

• Open License: CC-BY

introduces some of the major traditional arguments for and against the existence of God, as well as some less well-known, but thought-provoking arguments for the existence of God, and one of the most important new challenges to religious belief from the Cognitive Science of Religion. An introductory chapter traces the connection between philosophy and religion throughout Western history, and a final chapter addresses the place of non-Western and non-monotheistic religions within contemporary philosophy of religion.

• Open License: CC-BY

We often make judgments about good and bad, right and wrong. Philosophical ethics is the critical examination of these and other concepts central to how we evaluate our own and each others' behavior and choices. This text examines some of the main threads of discussion on these topics that have developed over the last couple of millennia, mostly within the Western cultural tradition.

• Open License: CC-BY

surveys the central themes in philosophy of mind and places them in a historical and contemporary context intended to engage first-time readers in the field. It focuses on debates about the status and character of the mind and its seemingly subjective nature in an apparently more objective world. includes insightful contributions on how to explain seemingly subjective feelings, the mystery of consciousness, conceptual understanding of the world outside of the mind, and free will. The book is designed to be used alone or alongside a reader of historical and contemporary original sources.

• Open License: CC-BY

It is important for students not only to get an appreciation and understanding of philosophy but also to be exposed to the very words and ideas of those who have shaped our thinking over the centuries. These readings are from the original sources, and these philosophers were the originators of many of the issues we still discuss today. Major areas of philosophy covered here are: Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Ethics, Socio-Political Philosophy, and Aesthetics.

• Open License: CC-BY

This is the WSIA edition of Trudy’s Govier’s seminal volume, Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation. Originally published in 1987 by Foris Publications, this was a pioneering work that played a major role in establishing argumentation theory as a discipline. Today, it is as relevant to the field as when it first appeared, with discussions of questions and issues that remain central to the study of argument. It has defined the main approaches to many of those issues and guided the ways in which we might respond to them. From this foundation, it sets the stage for further investigations and emerging research.

• Open License: CC-BY-NC

Engages first-time philosophy readers on a guided tour through the core concepts, questions, methods, arguments, and theories of epistemology—the branch of philosophy devoted to the study of knowledge. The book progresses systematically while placing key ideas and thinkers in historical and contemporary context. Central topics include the analysis of knowledge, the nature of epistemic justification, rationalism vs. empiricism, skepticism, the value of knowledge, the ethics of belief, Bayesian epistemology, social epistemology, and feminist epistemologies.

• Open License: CC-BY