Tirthak's Library

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PersonalCurriculums

These are curated collections of works (books, essays, youtube videos, or online lectures) arranged as learning pathways that will help you teach yourself the basics of a few classic fields of human knowledge. I built these over the years for self study. They’re personal roadmaps, not comprehensive university courses. Follow each pathway in sequence and sign in to keep track of your progress.

Western Philosophy

01Philosophy12 modules · 36 steps

Western Philosophy

A guided self-education in the Western philosophical tradition, read as a single long argument rather than a gallery of great men. You start with the whole story in outline, learn what an argument is and how to take one apart, then follow the questions from Athens through the Christian, Islamic and Jewish middle ages into the modern self, Kant, the nineteenth century, existentialism and the analytic turn. The promise is not memorising philosophers; it is being able to recognise an argument, reconstruct it honestly, test it, and say why you accept or reject it.

Eastern Philosophy

02Eastern Philosophy17 modules · 45 steps

Eastern Philosophy

A guided route through the philosophical traditions of Asia, read as argument rather than as devotion. It runs in three parts. India first and at greatest length, from the Upanishads through Buddhist and Jain dissent to the classical systems, the Bhakti poets and the modern arguments of Gandhi, Ambedkar and Tagore. Then the Islamic world, where Greek philosophy was inherited, extended and then attacked from within. Then East Asia, from Confucius and the Daoists to Zen and the Kyoto School. The promise is that you will be able to state a position from any of the three accurately, name who disagreed with it, and say why.

Logic: How to Think Clearly

03Logic7 modules · 21 steps

Logic: How to Think Clearly

Reasoning as a skill you practise rather than a subject you read about. It moves from what an argument is, through fallacies and formal logic in both the Greek and the Indian traditions, into evidence, probability, causation, and finally the psychology of your own errors, which is where most bad reasoning actually comes from. The last module is the point of the first six. The promise is that you will be able to take an argument apart, say precisely why it fails, and notice when the argument is your own.

Science: From Matter to Cosmos

04Science9 modules · 27 steps

Science: From Matter to Cosmos

A guided self-education in science, ordered by scale. You begin with how science knows anything at all, then climb from atoms to forces, from spacetime to the planet, from the first cells to the brain, and finish with the universe as a whole. Each module hands the next its subject, so that by the end the periodic table, natural selection and the expanding cosmos feel like chapters of one story rather than separate subjects. The promise is not a physics degree; it is being able to read a science headline and know where it sits, what would count as evidence for it, and what it would change if true.

The Shape of History

05History10 modules · 31 steps

The Shape of History

History taught as an argument about evidence rather than a list of dates. It opens with how historians actually work and what gets left out of the record, then moves through the human past without treating Europe as the trunk and everywhere else as branches: the first cities, the plural classical worlds, Afro-Eurasia in the middle centuries, the divergence, empire, and the twentieth century read from more than one side. Historians of the last fifty years are read as practitioners rather than as commentary. The promise is that you will meet a historical claim and know which question to ask of it.

World Literature

06Literature10 modules · 33 steps

World Literature

Thirty-three books that between them cover four thousand years and every inhabited continent. World here is meant literally: the Mesopotamian, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Arab, African, Latin American and European traditions in historical sequence, with about half the shelf written by women and no module set aside for them. India has its own pathway and is deliberately not compressed into a paragraph here. Every step pairs the book with someone who can talk about it well. The promise is that you will finish able to say how a book is made and why it moved you.

Learning to See: Art History

07Art History9 modules · 27 steps

Learning to See: Art History

A visual education that treats the European canon as one tradition among several. It opens by teaching you to look, and by asking Linda Nochlin's question about why there have been no great women artists, which the rest of the pathway then answers rather than shelves. Egypt, India, China, Japan, the Islamic world and Persia get modules rather than mentions. Every step pairs a book with a museum talk, a documentary or a curator, because art has to be seen and a book of paintings is not the same as the paintings. The promise is that you will stand in front of an unfamiliar object and be able to say something true about it.

The Architecture of Politics

08Political Philosophy10 modules · 30 steps

The Architecture of Politics

The arguments about who should rule, read in the order they were made. This pathway is built from primary texts rather than summaries, and it stages real disagreements instead of listing positions: Wollstonecraft and Paine answering Burke within a year of his book, Luxemburg answering the reformists, Nozick and Young answering Rawls from opposite directions. Kautilya sits beside Machiavelli, and Ambedkar, Davis and Lorde are read as political theorists rather than as a supplement. The promise is that you will be able to state the strongest version of a position you disagree with.

Economics: The Great Ideas

09Economics8 modules · 20 steps

Economics: The Great Ideas

An economics education built from arguments rather than textbooks. It runs from Smith and the classical tradition through the critics who rejected it, Keynes and the crises, development and inequality, and the behavioural work that showed people do not decide the way the models assumed. Heterodox economists are read as central rather than optional, and four survey textbooks that nobody self-studying ever finishes have been removed. The promise is that you will read an economic claim in a newspaper and know what would have to be true for it to hold.

Anthropology: Understanding Humanity

10Anthropology8 modules · 20 steps

Anthropology: Understanding Humanity

The comparative study of human life, taught through the fieldwork that made the discipline and the criticism that remade it. You start with what culture even means and how anyone claims to know it, then move through origins, kinship, ritual, exchange, empire and the modern city. Hurston, Benedict, Mead, Douglas, Mahmood, Das and Tuhiwai Smith are the spine here rather than the appendix. The promise is that you will find your own society strange, which is the whole point of the subject.

The Human Mind

11Psychology8 modules · 22 steps

The Human Mind

A scientific introduction to psychology modelled on the breadth of a modern behavioural-science degree: experimental method, statistics, brain and cognition, social and developmental psychology, personality and individual differences, language, psychopathology and behavioural decision-making. The promise is not pop-psychology fluency; it is the ability to understand how psychological knowledge is generated, evaluate evidence, and connect mind, brain, development and social context.

Linguistics

12Linguistics9 modules · 24 steps

Linguistics

The science of the thing you have used every day without noticing. It starts where descriptive linguistics actually started, with Panini's grammar of Sanskrit two thousand years before Europe attempted anything comparable, and goes on through sound, writing, structure, meaning, acquisition and change to the politics of whose speech gets called wrong. The last module stages a real disagreement between two linguists about whether your language shapes your thought. The promise is that ordinary sentences will stop looking obvious.

How We Learned What We Know

13History of Science10 modules · 33 steps

How We Learned What We Know

The history of science, told without starting in Greece and finishing in Cambridge. Babylonian and Indian astronomy, Islamic optics, Chinese technology, the European revolution, colonial extraction, the Bengali laboratories and the twentieth-century physics that ended in a bomb are treated as one continuous story. The women written out of it are written back into the modules where they worked rather than collected at the end, and the pathway closes on how science is actually funded, credited and contested now. The promise is that you will never again mistake the textbook order of discovery for the real one.

Mathematics for the Curious

14Mathematics8 modules · 25 steps

Mathematics for the Curious

Mathematics for an adult who wants to understand why it works, not to pass an exam. It starts with what mathematicians think they are doing, then goes to where the numerals actually came from, which is India and the Islamic world rather than Greece, and follows proof, algebra, geometry, calculus, chance and infinity from there. Emmy Noether sits in the algebra module because she is algebra, Ramanujan sits with infinite series, and Ada Lovelace sits with computation. Almost no symbol manipulation is required. The promise is that mathematics will start to look like a human argument you can follow.

Architecture: How Humans Build

15Architecture9 modules · 26 steps

Architecture: How Humans Build

Buildings are arguments you can walk through, and this teaches you to read them. The pathway runs from the Egyptian temple to the contemporary city, giving the South Asian, Islamic and East Asian building traditions modules of their own rather than paragraphs. Jane Jacobs, Denise Scott Brown, Lina Bo Bardi, Hassan Fathy and Laurie Baker are read as major figures, and the last module deals with the things architectural history usually skips: how a structure actually stands up, how buildings change once people move in, and what a building does to the senses other than sight.

World Cinema

16Film Studies10 modules · 31 steps

World Cinema

Films are the primary texts here, and the books teach you how to read them. You learn the grammar first, camera, cut, sound and story, each craft book paired with the films that show it working, and then follow that grammar through the movements that changed it in Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Japan, Bengal, Iran, Senegal, Brazil and Korea. Varda, Chytilova, Akerman and Campion are in the movements they belonged to rather than in a module of their own. Ray and Ghatak are here as world directors and India has a separate pathway. The promise is that you will never watch a film passively again.

India: The Long History

17Indian History11 modules · 28 steps

India: The Long History

A history of the subcontinent from the Indus cities to the present republic. It refuses to treat north India as the default and everywhere else as a footnote. The south, the Deccan and the Persianate world get their own modules, women in the freedom movement get theirs, and the historians who argue with each other are read as practitioners rather than as authorities. The promise is a history you could defend in an argument rather than one you inherited.

Indian Science and Its Makers

18Indian Science9 modules · 24 steps

Indian Science and Its Makers

What Indian science actually achieved, and when, with the evidence attached. It runs from the zero and the Kerala school's infinite series through Ayurvedic medicine, wootz steel and eighteenth-century inoculation to the Calcutta laboratories, the Nobel generation, the building of a scientific state and the Mars Orbiter. It is deliberately sober: the claims are the ones historians of science will defend, not the ones circulating online. Janaki Ammal, Kamala Sohonie, Asima Chatterjee and the women of the space programme appear in the laboratories and the missions where they worked.

Indian Literature

19Indian Literature22 modules · 91 steps

Indian Literature

A guided self-education in the literatures of the Indian subcontinent, read in order and across languages. You begin with how to read a tradition in twenty tongues, then follow it from the Vedas through Pali and Prakrit, the Sanskrit court, Sangam Tamil, the Bhakti poets, the Persianate centuries, the birth of the novel, Bengal, the Progressives, Partition, the women and Dalit writers who made movements of their own, the regional modernists, the stage, the English novel and the translation boom, ending with the nonsense and detectives every Indian reader grew up on. The promise is knowing the shape of the whole, so that a novel from Kerala and a ghazal from Delhi read as one conversation.