Guy Fletcher

Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject. Key topics in this new edition and their areas of focus include: Moral philosophy – the nature of our moral judgments and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences; and the possibility of moral responsibility given the sorts of things that cause behavior; Political philosophy – fundamental questions about the nature of states and their relationship to the citizens within those states Epistemology – what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; and whether we should form beliefs by trusting what other people tell us; Philosophy of mind – what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained; Philosophy of science – foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice, such as whether scientific theories are true; and Metaphysics - fundamental questions about the nature of reality, such as whether we have free will, or whether time travel is possible. This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ MOOC created by the University of Edinburgh’s _Eidyn_ research centre, and hosted by the Coursera platform.This book is also highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating discipline.

Welfare is the measure of how well someone’s life is going for them (either at one time or over a whole life). This concept is crucial throughout practical philosophy, appearing in debates in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and beyond. Philosophical discussions of welfare have centered around the extent to which welfare is purely a matter of the quality of one’s experience, the extent to which it is a matter of getting what one desires or, instead, acquiring some fixed set of desire-independent goods and the extent to which it is related to one’s nature. Another set of debates concerns possible theories of welfare, questions about how many theories of welfare are needed to account for all of the facts about welfare, and whether discourse about welfare is linguistically or conceptually pluralistic in a deep and significant way.