This is a Theory of Knowledge course built the way a philosophy course is built. Ten units — Core, Logic, Ethics; Politics, Religion; History, the Natural Sciences, the Human Sciences, Mathematics, the Arts — of eight or nine lessons each. Every lesson turns on one question that philosophy actually poses, and every question is anchored to one real case: a photograph a state doctored, a commission that indicted the government that appointed it, a banana duct-taped to a gallery wall and sold for $120,000.

How a lesson works

The course gives you the toys. For each question you get the case, and around it the stimuli: quotations that are real and were checked against their sources, concepts with the philosopher still attached, studies, artworks, arguments that disagree with each other. What the course does not give you is a settled answer, because for these questions nobody has one that survives inspection.

The playing is yours. A lesson is forty-five minutes of thinking with the materials, not through them — and the questions at the end of each lesson are where the thinking gets tested.

Commit before we compare

Once per lesson, the play stops. You meet two positions — sometimes three — that cannot both be right, and you choose one. Commit before we compare: you write your verdict before any comparison arrives — naming the side you take and the price you accept for taking it. Every position on offer costs something; the question is where you find out what yours costs you.

“It depends” is not on the menu. Neither is “there are many perspectives.” There are; you must still pick one, defend it, and pay for it. Your commitments are also not disposable: later units return to them, with new cases, and ask whether they survive.

What is where

• The unit texts are the course: the cases, the arguments, the questions, and the footnotes that let you check every claim.
• A slide deck per lesson carries the same material to the classroom wall.
• A handout per lesson is your table copy — the case, the key terms, room to write.
• A reading list per section closes each of the three parts. The entries marked ★ are the books you choose among for your semester reading — see About.

And the IB assessments?

The Essay’s central move — take a position, defend it, name what it costs — is exactly what every question trains, forty times a year. Dedicated Exhibition and Essay workshops, which translate this course’s questions into the IB’s assessment formats, are a separate strand and are still being built. Until they land, the honest summary is: this course teaches you to think in the way the assessments reward, and the format-specific drill comes later.