The Examined Life

This course is a first survey of the questions every human eventually asks — knowledge, reality, free will, right action, the good life, justice, God, beauty — organized by the question rather than the philosopher, on the model of the short, plain chapters of Russell's Problems of Philosophy. Each unit takes one perennial question and examines it for itself; thinkers enter only where they bear on the problem, set side by side so the student can compare their answers. The skill it trains is discernment: take a belief you never chose, find the edge of what you actually understand, and reason past it — where the win is never winning the argument but getting closer to true, which sometimes means losing well.

On every live question — free will, what's right, what we owe each other — both sides are built at full strength first, and then the house says where it lands and why; students practice making the strongest case for positions they don't hold, and one who dissents with a defended case passes. The unit on God is the single scoped exception — a declared abstention, not a shrug: the house argues, then says plainly that it will not settle this one, and prints its reason. The later units open doors outward — a one-unit taste of eudaimonia that the strand's Good Life capstone later completes, and a unit on thinking well that bridges to logic and rhetoric. The capstone unit, The Examined Life, Returned To, bookends the course: the teacher stops teaching and speaks straight to the student about what he now holds and what it cost.

The full course opens September 1. Founding Families watch the ladder fill in — at a price that never moves.