Thinking Like a Philosopher
Learn to challenge hidden assumptions, test everyday arguments, and resolve moral dilemmas with clarity. Walk away with practical intellectual habits for navigating conversations and tough personal choices.
Like Duolingo, but for Thinking Like a Philosopher. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Sharpening How You Think and Deciding How to Live. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Thinking Like a Philosopher
- Philosophical disputes often persist even when both sides agree on all the empirical facts
- Disagreements usually hinge on unstated values or baseline assumptions (e.g., individual privacy versus collective physical safety)
- Exposing unstated premises brings the real clash into view
- Socratic questioning investigates what assumptions must hold true for a claim to stand
- It shifts a conversation from attacking someone's conclusion to collaboratively inspecting their premises
- A proper philosophical probe tests the boundaries of a rule by asking about edge cases
- Many philosophical deadlocks occur because both sides use the same word with different definitions (semantic confusion)
- Defining core terms at the outset clarifies whether the disagreement is substantive or merely linguistic
- A debate cannot proceed productively if the central term has moving goalposts
- Believing you already possess complete knowledge eliminates the curiosity needed to investigate
- Philosophical inquiry begins with intellectual humility—recognizing what you do not yet know (Socratic ignorance)
- Treating a position as a possession to defend closes the mind to counterevidence
- Steelmanning means reconstructing an opponent's argument in its strongest, most coherent form
- It involves actively filling in missing premises or removing weak rhetorical phrasing to test the core insight
- Refuting a weak caricature (strawmanning) fails to test whether your own position actually holds up
- An argument must have both factually true premises and logic where the conclusion necessarily follows
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 Thinking Like a Philosopher 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.
Two neighbors agree that speed cameras cut down accidents, yet one still objects to them. What is the most likely cause of their clash?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where Thinking Like a Philosopher takes you
- 1
Sharpening How You Think
- Questioning Assumptions
- Testing Reasons and Spotting Traps
- 2
Deciding How to Live
- Navigating Moral Dilemmas
- Finding Agency in What You Cannot Control
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Thinking Like a Philosopher is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. 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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Start Thinking Like a Philosopher today.
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