The great ideas of philosophy / Daniel N. Robinson.

Course no. 4200.

"Lecture transcript and course guidebook"--Cover.

v. 1. Lecture 1 From the Upanishads to Homer ; Lecture 2 Philosophy: Did the Greeks invent it? ; Lecture 3 Pythagoras and the divinity of number ; Lecture 4 What is there? ; Lecture 5 The Greek tragedians on man's fate ; Lecture 6 Herodotus and the lamp of history -- Lecture 7 Socrates on the examined life ; Lecture 8 Plato's search for truth ; Lecture 9 Can virtue be taught? ; Lecture 10 Plato's 'Republic': Man writ large ; Lecture 11 Hippocrates and the science of life ; Lecture 12 Aristotle on the knowable. v. 2. Lecture 13 Aristotle on friendship ; Lecture 14 Aristotle on the perfect life ; Lecture 15 Rome, the Stoics, and the rule of law ; Lecture 16 The Stoic bridge to Christianity ; Lecture 17 Roman law: Making a city of the once-wide world ; Lecture 18 The light within: Augustine on human nature --
Lecture 19 Islam ; Lecture 20 Secular knowledge: The idea of university ; Lecture 21 The reappearance of experimental science ; Lecture 22 Scholasticism and the theory of natural law ; Lecture 23 The Renaissance: Was there one? ; Lecture 24 Let us burn the witches to save them. v. 3. Lecture 25 Francis Bacon and the authority of experience ; Lecture 26 Descartes and the authority of reason ; Lecture 27 Newton: The saint of science ; Lecture 28 Hobbes and the social machine ; Lecture 29 Locke's Newtonian science of the mind ; Lecture 30 No matter? The challenge of materialism --
Disc 6. Lecture 31 Hume and the pursuit of happiness ; Lecture 32 Thomas Reid and the Scottish school ; Lecture 33 France and the philosophes ; Lecture 34 'The Federalist Papers' and the great experiment ; Lecture 35 What is Enlightenment? Kant on freedom ; Lecture 36 Moral science and the natural world. v. 4. Lecture 37 Phrenology: A science of the mind ; Lecture 38 The idea of freedom ; Lecture 39 The Hegelians and history ; Lecture 40 The aesthetic movement: Genius ; Lecture 41 Nietzsche at the twilight ; Lecture 42 The liberal tradition: J.S. Mill --
Lecture 43 Darwin and nature's "purposes" ; Lecture 44 Marxism: Dead but not forgotten ; Lecture 45 The Freudian world ; Lecture 46 The radical William James ; Lecture 47 William James' pragmatism ; Lecture 48 Wittgenstein and the discursive turn. v. 5.Lecture 49 Alan Turing in the forest of wisdom ; Lecture 50 Four theories of the good life ; Lecture 51 Ontology: What there "really" is ; Lecture 52 Philosophy of science: The last word? ; Lecture 53 Philosophy of psychology and related confusions ; Lecture 54 Philosophy of mind, if there is one -- Lecture 55 What makes a problem "moral" ; Lecture 56 Medicine and the value of life ; Lecture 57 On the nature of law ; Lecture 58 Justice and just wars ; Lecture 59 Aesthetics: Beauty without observers ; Lecture 60 God: Really?

The "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, and the terms of civic and political life is encompassed by the name philosophy. Three persistent themes--understood as problems--are knowledge, conduct, and governance, on which there is a storehouse of insights, some so utterly persuasive as to have shaped thought itself. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans, and Scholastic philosophers, through the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and Romanticism to Darwin and Freud, these lectures examine the long history of the discipline in which humanity criticizes its own certainties and weighs the worthiness of its most secure beliefs