The idea

Most TOK material asks students to survey positions: list the perspectives, note that each has strengths and weaknesses, move on. This course is built on the opposite wager: that you learn what a position is worth only when you have to hold one while it is under pressure. So the course is a philosophy course wearing TOK’s structure — its questions are the ones philosophy actually poses inside each area of knowledge, its cases are real and recent enough to look up, and its method is commitment under pressure rather than survey.

The working principle is toys, not tours. Each lesson hands you the toys — a live question, a real case, verified quotations, concepts with their owners named, studies, artworks — and the playing is yours. There are no scripted lesson plans and no paragraph anywhere that begins “some people think X, others think Y, and both have a point.” Where the material is genuinely unsettled, the course says so and makes you take a side anyway.

Commit before we compare

The commitment mechanism. At the point of maximum pressure in each lesson — not in a tidy exercise afterwards — you meet positions that cannot both be right. The sequence is always commit → compare → price:

1. Commit. Before any comparison arrives, you write your verdict: two or three sentences naming the side you take.
2. Compare. Only then does the class hold the positions against each other — and you against a partner who chose the other side.
3. Price. Every position costs something, and your written commitment must name the price you accept. A self-check under each question tells you the minimum bar: the trap the question is built to catch, and how to know whether your answer walked into it.

Two things the question forbids: “it depends,” and the survey answer. Saying “there are many perspectives and they all have something to offer” is not humility if you have never been forced to ask which one is right and found that you cannot easily answer. That forced condition — aporia, the productive state of discovering that what you thought you knew was not well-grounded — is the target intellectual state of the course. Epistemic humility is earned; epistemic cowardice just skips the fight.

Commitments also do not expire at the bell. Units re-open earlier verdicts against new cases — the position you signed in one discipline gets re-tried in another, and you must re-sign it or revise it in writing. Revision is allowed; forgetting is not.

The shape of the course

Three sections, ten units, each unit eight or nine lessons, each lesson one question and one real case.

• Core — Core (knowledge itself), Logic, Ethics. Logic and Ethics are full units here, not sidebars: they are too important in philosophy to be anything less.
• Areas of Knowledge — History, the Natural Sciences, the Human Sciences, Mathematics, the Arts.
• Themes — Politics, Religion.

The recommended path runs Core → Areas of Knowledge → Themes, in the order listed; the retrieval warm-ups that open later units assume roughly that sequence. Each section closes with a reading list of primary texts, secondary works, fiction, and film.

The rule about sources

Nothing here is quoted from memory. Every quotation in the unit texts was checked verbatim against its source; where a source could not be verified, the text paraphrases and says whose claim it is. Every section that introduces a philosopher, a study, or a historical claim carries a footnote that lets you trace it. This is not decoration — checking the footnote is one of the course’s moves, and more than one lesson turns on what happens when a confident citation is actually chased down.

Your three reading choices

Across the two years of this course you read three books of your own choosing — one each semester, each read in full rather than in extracts:

• Semester 1 — Core. One book on knowledge, reasoning, and the good life.
• Semester 2 — Areas of Knowledge. One book on how a discipline you care about actually knows what it knows.
• Semester 3 — Themes. One book on power, belief, and how societies hold together.

You choose, you read the whole thing, and you bring it to the seminar. Each semester’s choice is any one of the books marked ★ in that section’s reading list. Students who chose different books teach each other what they found — which is the point of letting you choose.

Assessment

The IB assesses TOK through an Essay and an Exhibition. The Essay’s essential move — take a position, sustain it, and be honest about what it costs — is the move every one of these questions drills, all year. The Exhibition’s raw material — real objects that make knowledge questions concrete — is what every lesson’s case box already is. Dedicated workshops that translate the course’s questions into the IB’s formats (knowledge-question phrasing, the 35 IA prompts, the 950-word commentary, past Essay titles) are a separate strand of the course and are still being built; until they arrive, the units train the thinking and flag nothing as “for the exam,” which is deliberate.