General Science
Video Lectures - Great Ideas of Philosophy
Publisher: Teaching Company, 2009, 60pp, 2nd ed.
Humanity left childhood and entered the troubled but productive world when it started to criticize its own certainties and weigh the worthiness of its most secure beliefs. Thus began that "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, the terms of civic and political life—the good, the better, the best. The debate continues, and one remains aloof to it at a very heavy price, for "the unexamined life is not worth living." This course of 60 lectures gives the student a sure guide and interpreter as the major themes within the Long Debate are presented and considered.
Lectures
| 1. | From the Upanishads to Homer |
| 2. | Philosophy—Did the Greeks Invent It? |
| 3. | Pythagoras and the Divinity of Number |
| 4. | What Is There? |
| 5. | The Greek Tragedians on Man’s Fate |
| 6. | Herodotus and the Lamp of History |
| 7. | Socrates on the Examined Life |
| 8. | Plato's Search For Truth |
| 9. | Can Virtue Be Taught? |
| 10. | Plato's Republic—Man Writ Large |
| 11. | Hippocrates and the Science of Life |
| 12. | Aristotle on the Knowable |
| 13. | Aristotle on Friendship |
| 14. | Aristotle on the Perfect Life |
| 15. | Rome, the Stoics, and the Rule of Law |
| 16. | The Stoic Bridge to Christianity |
| 17. | Roman Law—Making a City of the Once-Wide World |
| 18. | The Light Within—Augustine on Human Nature |
| 19. | Islam |
| 20. | Secular Knowledge—The Idea of University |
| 21. | The Reappearance of Experimental Science |
| 22. | Scholasticism and the Theory of Natural Law |
| 23. | The Renaissance—Was There One? |
| 24. | Let Us Burn the Witches to Save Them |
| 25. | Francis Bacon and the Authority of Experience |
| 26. | Descartes and the Authority of Reason |
| 27. | Newton—The Saint of Science |
| 28. | Hobbes and the Social Machine |
| 29. | Locke’s Newtonian Science of the Mind |
| 30. | No matter? The Challenge of Materialism |
| 31. | Hume and the Pursuit of Happiness |
| 32. | Thomas Reid and the Scottish School |
| 33. | France and the Philosophes |
| 34. | The Federalist Papers and the Great Experiment |
| 35. | What Is Enlightenment? Kant on Freedom |
| 36. | Moral Science and the Natural World |
| 37. | Phrenology—A Science of the Mind |
| 38. | The Idea of Freedom |
| 39. | The Hegelians and History |
| 40. | The Aesthetic Movement—Genius |
| 41. | Nietzsche at the Twilight |
| 42. | The Liberal Tradition—J. S. Mill |
| 43. | Darwin and Nature’s “Purposes” |
| 44. | Marxism—Dead But Not Forgotten |
| 45. | The Freudian World |
| 46. | The Radical William James |
| 47. | William James's Pragmatism |
| 48. | Wittgenstein and the Discursive Turn |
| 49. | Alan Turing in the Forest of Wisdom |
| 50. | Four Theories of the Good Life |
| 51. | Ontology—What There "Really" Is |
| 52. | Philosophy of Science—The Last Word? |
| 53. | Philosophy of Psychology and Related Confusions |
| 54. | Philosophy of Mind, If There Is One |
| 55. | What makes a Problem "Moral" |
| 56. | Medicine and the Value of Life |
| 57. | On the Nature of Law |
| 58. | Justice and Just Wars |
| 59. | Aesthetics—Beauty Without Observers |
| 60. | God—Really? |