Acknowledgments

A book about accumulated human wisdom about how to live incurs debts that cannot fully be repaid. This one tries at least to name them.

To the Philosophical Traditions

This book draws on thousands of years of philosophical inquiry conducted across every inhabited continent. The thinkers whose frameworks appear in these pages — Confucius and Aristotle, Nagarjuna and Kant, Simone de Beauvoir and the Stoics, the unnamed thinkers who first articulated ubuntu philosophy, the generations of Buddhist teachers from the Pali canon through Zen through Tibetan traditions, the Daoist sages, the Upanishadic authors whose questions about consciousness remain as alive today as they were three thousand years ago — did not know each other, did not share a language, and were often working from radically different assumptions about what human beings are and what we need. That their frameworks, placed in conversation, illuminate each other so productively is one of the more quietly astonishing facts about human intellectual life.

This book is, among other things, an argument that philosophy has always been a global project and that treating it as the exclusive inheritance of any single culture is an impoverishment for everyone.

To the Translators

Much of the philosophical work represented here was conducted in languages that most readers of this book cannot read: Classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Pali, ancient Greek, Latin, German, French, Japanese. The scholars who have spent their careers producing accurate, readable, philosophically sensitive translations have made philosophy genuinely accessible across cultural and linguistic boundaries in a way that would have been impossible even a century ago.

Particular thanks is owed to those who have produced open-access translations and critical editions, making these primary sources available to readers who cannot access university libraries or afford expensive scholarly volumes. Philosophy should not be gated behind paywalls. Translators who have worked to prevent this have done something quietly radical and important.

To the Open-Source and Open-Education Communities

This textbook is itself a product of open culture. The conviction that knowledge is most valuable when it is freely shared — when anyone with an internet connection can access a serious treatment of philosophy, regardless of whether they can afford tuition at an institution that offers it — is a philosophical commitment as much as a technical one. The open-source software ecosystem that makes projects like this possible, and the broader open-education movement that has argued for decades that educational materials should be freely available, have created the conditions that allowed this book to exist.

To Contributors

Philosophy is not a solitary enterprise, whatever the romantic image of the lone thinker suggests. This project has benefited from readers who identified errors in reasoning, flagged traditions that were underrepresented, caught places where the treatment of a framework was too thin or too dismissive, and pointed toward thinkers and texts that deserved inclusion. The book is better for every one of those corrections and additions.

Contributions, corrections, and expansions remain welcome under the terms of the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license. The conversation continues.

To the Philosophical Communities

Academic philosophy, at its best, is a community of inquiry that holds itself to rigorous standards of argument and evidence while grappling seriously with questions that resist easy resolution. The popular philosophy community — the philosophers who write for general audiences, who host podcasts, who make the discipline accessible without dumbing it down — has kept philosophy alive for people who would never encounter it in an academic context. Both communities matter. Both have made this book possible by keeping the questions alive.

Special acknowledgment is owed to the philosophy educators who have, for years, taught introductory courses to students who didn't necessarily choose to be there and found ways to make the questions matter anyway. The first time a student realizes that a problem they've been carrying alone for years is a problem that the best minds in human history have also grappled with — that moment of recognition, of not being alone with it — is one of the most powerful things education can accomplish. This book is trying to create that moment for people who never got to be in that classroom.

A Note on Sources and Representation

Every effort has been made to present philosophical traditions with accuracy, charity, and respect. Where the treatment of any tradition falls short — where representation is thin, where a framework is oversimplified, where important thinkers within a tradition are missing — these are failures of the current version and opportunities for the next one. Scholars of any of the traditions represented here are warmly invited to contribute corrections and expansions.

The goal is not comprehensiveness — no single textbook can be comprehensive across the global history of philosophical thought. The goal is an honest, useful, reasonably broad introduction that opens doors rather than closing them.

This book exists because people asked good questions and refused easy answers. That is, in the end, what philosophy is.