Philosophical Inquiry: Tools for Hard Questions
Like Duolingo, but for Philosophical Inquiry: Tools for Hard Questions. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
For the part of you with thirty open tabs that never became anything.
24 levels across 4 sections, about 48 minutes end to end, roughly 10 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Sharpening Your Thinking Tools, Navigating Ethical Dilemmas, Probing Knowledge and the Mind, and Agency and the Social Order. It assumes you already know the basics.
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Key ideas in Philosophical Inquiry: Tools for Hard Questions
- Descriptive claims report empirical facts about how the world actually functions.
- Normative claims assert values or obligations regarding how things ought to be.
- Bridging an 'is' claim to an 'ought' claim requires an explicit moral bridge premise.
- Validity depends strictly on structural necessity, not the factual truth of premises.
- If all premises were true in a valid structure, the conclusion could not be false.
- A valid argument with at least one false premise fails to be sound.
- Charity demands repairing weak phrasing to critique an opponent's best possible case.
- Steel-manning an argument avoids the straw man fallacy of refuting trivial errors.
- Charity preserves your critical disagreement; it does not concede the final verdict.
- An enthymeme is an argument with a vital, unstated premise left implicit by the speaker.
- Philosophers surface enthymemes by asking what missing claim must be true for the leap to work.
- Unstated premises frequently smuggle in controversial normative assumptions without defense.
- Thought experiments eliminate messy real-world logistics to isolate targeted moral variables.
- Trolley problems test utilitarian vs. deontological duties by fixing outcome certainty.
- Locke's prince and cobbler isolates psychological continuity from bodily continuity.
- A universal claim ('all X are Y') collapses if even one genuine exception exists.
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 Philosophical Inquiry: Tools for Hard Questions 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.
Picture a heated town hall meeting. Which of these statements is a normative claim?
Get it right to open this lesson and 23 more in the app.
Where Philosophical Inquiry: Tools for Hard Questions takes you
Move past surface-level debates into rigorous philosophical thinking. Examine the structure of arguments, test moral systems against difficult dilemmas, and unpack the foundations of knowledge, free will, and consciousness.
- 1
Sharpening Your Thinking Tools
- Unpacking Arguments and Hidden Assumptions
- Stress-Testing Claims with Counterexamples
- 2
Navigating Ethical Dilemmas
- Weighing Consequences Against Principles
- Cultivating Character and Existential Agency
- 3
Probing Knowledge and the Mind
- Investigating the Foundations of Knowledge
- The Enigma of Consciousness and the Self
- 4
Agency and the Social Order
- Free Will, Determinism, and Responsibility
- Legitimizing Power and the Social Contract
4 sections · 8 units · 24 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Philosophical Inquiry: Tools for Hard Questions is taught in the The Storyteller style: every lesson is a story. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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