The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition Lectures

Before ancient Greek civilization, the world hosted deep insights into the human condition but offered little critical reflection. Homer planted the seeds of this reflection.

The ancient Greeks were the first to objectify the products of their own thought and feeling and be willing to subject both to critical scrutiny. Why?

How can we comprehend the very integrity of the universe and our place within it, if not by way of the most abstract relations?

How many kinds of stuff make up the cosmos? Might everything, in fact, be reducible to one kind of thing?

The ancient philosophers were only part of the rich community of thought and wonder that surrounded the world's first great dramatists and their landmark depth psychologies.

Can history actually teach us? Herodotus looked at what he took to be certain universal human aspirations and deficiencies and concluded that indeed history could.

Rhetoric wins arguments, but it is philosophy that shows us the way to our humanity.

If one knows what one is looking for, why is a search necessary? And if one doesn't know, how is that search even possible? Socrates versus the Sophists.

If virtue can be taught, whose virtue will it be? A look at the Socratic recognition of multiculturalism and moral relativism.

This most famous of Plato's dialogues begins with the metaphor—or perhaps the reality—of the polis (community) as the expanded version of the person, with the fate of each inextricably bound to that of the other.

Hippocratic medicine did much to demystify the human condition and the natural factors that affect it.

Smith knows that a particular triangle contains 180 degrees because he has measured it, while Jones knows it by definition. But do they know the same thing?

If true friendship is possible only between equals, how equal must they be—and with respect to what?

What sort of life is right for humankind, and what is it about us that makes this so?

The Stoics found in language something that would separate humanity from the animate realm, and that gave Rome a philosophy to civilize the world.

The Jewish Christians, Hellenized or Orthodox, defended a monotheistic source of law.

Roman development of law based on a conception of nature, and of human nature, is one of the signal achievements in the history of civilization.

Thoughts and ideas from the fathers of the early Christian Church culminated in St. Augustine, who explores humanity's capacity for good and evil.

What did the Prophet teach that so moved the masses? And how did the Western world come to understand the threat embodied in these Eastern "heresies"?

Apart from trade schools devoted to medicine and law, the university as we know it did not come into being until 12th-century Paris.

There were really two great renaissances. The first occurred at Oxford in the 13th century: the recovery of experimental inquiry by Roger Bacon and others.

Thomas Aquinas's treatises on law would stand for centuries as the foundation of critical inquiry in jurisprudence.

From Petrarch in the south to Erasmus in the north, Humanistic thought collided with those seeking to defend faith.

Even in the time we honor with the title of Renaissance ran an undercurrent of a heady and ominous mixture of natural magic, natural science, and cruel superstition.

Francis Bacon would come to be regarded as the prophet of Newton and originator of modern experimental science.

Descartes is remembered for "I think, therefore I am." With his work, the authority of revelation, history, and title was replaced by the weight of reason itself.

In the century after Newton's death, the Enlightenment's major architects of reform and revolution defended their ideas in terms of Newtonian science and its implications.

As the idea of social science gained force, Hobbes's controversial treatise helped to naturalize the civil realm, readying it for scientific explanation.

If all of physical reality can be reduced to elementary corpuscular entities, is the mind nothing more than comparable elements held together by something akin to gravity?

When Berkeley reacted to Locke with an extravagant critique of materialism, he unwittingly reinforced claims of skeptics he meant to defeat.

David Hume was perhaps the most influential philosopher to write in English, carrying empiricism to its logical end and thus grounding morality, truth, causation, and governance in experience.

Thomas Reid was Hume's most successful and influential critic, with a common sense psychology that was both naturalistic and compatible with religious teaching and which reached America's founders.

The leading French thinkers of the 18th century—Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, and Diderot—appealed directly to the ordinary citizen, encouraging skepticism toward traditional authority.

The extraordinary documents written in support of the proposed constitution represent a profound legacy in political philosophy.

Here the limits of reason and the very framework of thought complete—and in another respect undermine—the very project of the Enlightenment.

Kant traced the implications of a human life as lived in both the natural world of causality and the intelligible world of reason (where morality arises).

In founding the now-discredited theory of phrenology, Franz Gall nevertheless helped define today's brain sciences.

The idea of freedom developed by Goethe, Schiller, and other romantic idealists forms a central chapter in the Long Debate over whether or not science has overstepped its bounds.

Hegel's Reason in History and other works inspired a transcendentalist movement that spanned Europe, Great Britain, and the United States.

By the second half of the 19th century, the House of Intellect was divided between two competing perspectives: the growing aesthetic concept of reality and the narrowing scientific view.

A student of the classics, Nietzsche came to regard the human condition as fatally tied to needs and motives that operate at the most powerful levels of existence.

When can the state or the majority legitimately exercise power over the actions of individuals? The modern liberal answer is set forth in the work of Mill, an almost unchallenged authority for more than a century.

From social Darwinism to sociobiology, the evolutionary science of the late 18th and 19th centuries dominates social thought and political initiatives.

After years of influence, the Marxist critique of society is now more a subtext than a guiding bible of reform.

Marx, Darwin, and Freud are the chief 19th-century architects of modern thought about society and self—each was nominally "scientific" in approach and believed their theories to be grounded in the realm of observable facts.

Mortally opposed to all "block universes" of certainty and theoretical hubris, James offered a quintessentially home-grown psychology of experience.

Working in the realm of common sense, James directed the attention of philosophy and science to that ultimate arena of confirmation in which our deepest and most enduring interests are found.

Meaning arises from conventions that presuppose not only a social world but a world in which we share the interests and aspirations of others.

Turing is famous for breaking Germany's famed World War II Enigma code, but, as a founder of modern computational science, he also wrote influentially about the possibilities of breaking the mind's code.

The contemplative. The active. The fatalistic. The hedonistic. There are good but limited arguments for each of these.

From the Greek ontos, there is a branch of metaphysics referred to as ontology, devoted to the question of "real being." Ontological controversies have broad ethical and social implications.

Should fundamental questions, if they are to be answered with precision and objectivity, be answered by science? We consider Thomas Kuhn's influential treatise on scientific revolutions.

Psychology is a subject of many and varied interests but narrow modes of inquiry. Today cognitive neuroscience is the dominant approach, but other schools have reappeared.

The principal grounds of disagreement within the wide-ranging subject of philosophy of mind center on whether the right framework for considering issues is provided by developed sciences or humanistic frameworks.

Is there a “moral reality”? We examine especially David Hume’s rejection of the idea that there is anything “moral” in the external world.

What guidance does moral philosophy provide in the domain of medicine, where life-and-death decisions are made daily?

Philosophy of law is an ancient subject, developed by Aristotle and elaborated by Cicero. We see how natural law theory has evolved through the Enlightenment and the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin.

Theories of the “just war,” beginning with St. Augustine and including St. Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vittoria, and Francisco Suarez, set forth principles by which engaging in and conducting war are justified.

The subject of beauty is among the oldest in philosophy, treated at length in several of the dialogues of Plato and in his Symposium, and redefined through history. What is beauty? Is there anything “rational” about it?

We consider various theological arguments for and against belief in God, including those of Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, and William James.