In a beginner-friendly voice, Stephen Hetherington elucidates how intellectual 'tools' from a diversity of traditions, east and west, can enable us to start doing philosophy - that is, to think 'from scratch' in a philosophical way. He explores many classical topics and issues that have preoccupied philosophers from Plato, early Buddhists, and Confucius to Karl Marx and beyond - selves, souls, identity, will, knowing and reasoning, among others - and presents possible methods for responding to different theories.