Ryan’s Outline of Philosophy

Author

Ryan Reece

Published

October 10, 2025

Preface

A graph by Simon Raper (2012) of influences among philosophers according to Wikipedia (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

Note: This is under construction

This site is my working draft of notes from philosophy papers and books I read. I share it here for collaborators and perhaps general interest. If you find any of it useful, please let me know:

Note: Scope disclaimer

While the scope of this project is ambitiously large, clearly it cannot pretend to represent all of philosophy by any stretch. This is a meandering of one person through his own thoughts on philosophy, a meandering that is primarily western and focused on empiricism, although not entirely either.

Note: But there’s a lot here that isn’t even philosophy?

When I’m trying to understand something, I don’t see a sharp line between knowing my way around and getting into the details.

Wilfrid Sellars:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things… 1

1 Sellars (1963), p. 1.