Wikipedia is one of the best things humanity has yet invented for allowing us to use up any extra time we have hanging around. As an added bonus, this time comes with a putative “educational value” benefit, which makes it easy to justify the time and avoid guilt over it.
One example of how this might happen: you could go to the “Glossary of philosophical isms” page, which lists all the topics relating to philosophy that end in -ism. They all come with a short definition, and links to their particular entries (although several of them don’t have pages yet).
Almost any one of these can form the start of a trail of Wikipedia surfing that ends up with you reading about almost anything. It’s web crack for intellectuals.
Some examples:
Coherentism – There are two distinct types of coherentism. One refers to the coherence theory of truth, which restricts true sentences to those that cohere with some specified set of sentences. Someone’s belief is true just in case it is coherent with all or most of their other beliefs. Usually, coherence is taken to imply something stronger than mere consistency. Statements that are comprehensive and meet the requirements of Occam’s razor are usually to be preferred. The second type of coherentism is the belief in the coherence theory of justification, an epistemological theory opposing foundationalism and offering a solution to the regress argument. In this epistemological capacity, it is a theory about how belief can be justified.
Eternalism – a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time. It builds on the standard method of modeling time as a dimension in physics, to give time a similar ontology to that of space. This would mean that time is just another dimension, that future events are “already there”, and that there is no objective flow of time.
Transcendental idealism – the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and later Kantian and German Idealist philosophers; a view according to which our experience is not about the things as they are in themselves, but about the things as they appear to us. It differs from standard (empirical) idealism in that it does not claim that the objects of our experiences would be in any sense within our mind. The idea is that whenever we experience something, we experience it as it is for ourselves: the object is real as well as mind-independent, but is in a sense corrupted by our cognition (by the categories and the forms of sensibility, space and time). Transcendental idealism denies that we could have knowledge of the thing in itself. A view that holds the opposite is called transcendental realism.
There are also a lot of entries about some -isms that highlight the bizarre offspring of the history of religion’s engagement with philosophy. I’ll leave them for you to find for yourself, but the byways and side roads of that particular festival of surfing
