Core Philosophical Standpoints
Move past surface-level quotes to explore the defining debates of Western thought. Trace how rival thinkers tackled ethics, reality, political authority, and existential meaning.
Like Duolingo, but for Core Philosophical Standpoints. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
21 levels across 4 sections, about 42 minutes end to end, roughly 8 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Evaluating Moral Dilemmas, Mapping Knowledge and Reality, Legitimizing Power and Society, and Constructing the Self and Meaning. It assumes you already know the basics.
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Key ideas in Core Philosophical Standpoints
- Consequentialism ranks choices solely by aggregate net wellbeing produced
- Motives and traditions hold zero moral weight apart from their outcomes
- An action is morally mandatory if it yields higher net utility than alternatives
- A maxim must be conceivable as a universal law without undermining itself
- Universalizing false promises destroys trust, making promising impossible
- Contradiction in conception reveals that an action cannot rationally be willed
- The Humanity Formulation forbids using rational agents merely as a means
- Deontological side-constraints bar sacrificing one person for group utility
- Consent and individual dignity place strict limits on aggregate calculations
- Act utilitarianism recalculates utility fresh for every individual scenario
- Rule utilitarianism defends rights because reliable rules produce better utility
- Rule utilitarianism forbids breaking rules even when an isolated breach gains utility
- Pure utilitarianism treats an agent as a neutral conduit for aggregate utility
- Williams argues moral integrity requires room for core personal commitments
- Alienating agents from their deep projects undermines moral personhood
- Virtue is the intermediate state between deficiency and excess.
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Core Philosophical Standpoints the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
Under pure consequentialism, what moral weight do traditional customs and noble motives carry on their own?
Get it right to open this lesson and 20 more in the app.
Where Core Philosophical Standpoints takes you
- 1
Evaluating Moral Dilemmas
- Weighing Consequences Against Duties
- Cultivating Character and Agency
- 2
Mapping Knowledge and Reality
- Testing Reason Against Experience
- Setting the Limits of Understanding
- 3
Legitimizing Power and Society
- Contracting the Social Order
- Deconstructing Values and Control
- 4
Constructing the Self and Meaning
- Navigating Radical Freedom and the Absurd
4 sections · 7 units · 21 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
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