Course Lecture Titles

1.

Introduction

2.

The Pre-Socratics—Physics and Metaphysics

3.

The Sophists and Social Science

4.

Plato—Metaphysics

5.

Plato—Politics

6.

Plato—Psychology

7.

Aristotle—Metaphysics

8.

Aristotle—Politics

9.

Aristotle—Ethics

10.

Stoicism and Epicureanism

11.

Roman Eclecticism—Cicero and Polybius

12.

Roman Skepticism—Sextus Empiricus

13.

Introduction

14.

Job and the Problem of Suffering

15.

The Hebrew Bible and Covenantal History

16.

The Synoptic Gospels—The Historical Jesus and the
Kingdom of God

17.

Paul—Justification by Faith

18.

Plotinus and Neo-Platonism

19.

Augustine—Grace and Free Will

20.

Aquinas and Christian Aristotelianism

21.

Universals in Medieval Thought

22.

Mysticism and Meister Eckhart

23.

Luther—Law and Gospel

24.

Calvin and Protestantism

25.

Introduction

26.

Machiavelli and the Origins of Political
Science

27.

More's Utopianism

28.

Erasmus Against Enthusiasm

29.

Galileo and the New Astronomy

30.

Bacon's New Organon and the New
Science

31.

Descartes—The Method of Modern Philosophy

32.

Hobbes—Politics and the State of Nature

33.

Spinoza—Rationalism and the Reverence for
Being

34.

Pascal—Skepticism and Jansenism

35.

Bayle—Skepticism and Calvinism

36.

Newton and Enlightened Science

37.

Introduction

38.

Locke—Politics

39.

Locke—The Revolution in Knowledge

40.

Vico and the New Science of History

41.

Montesquieu and Political Thought

42.

The Worldly Philosophy of Bernard Mandeville

43.

Bishop Berkeley—Idealism and Critique of the
Enlightenment

44.

Hume's Epistemology

45.

Hume's Theory of Morality

46.

Hume's Natural Religion

47.

Adam Smith and the Origins of Political
Economy

48.

Rousseau's Dissent

49.

Introduction

50.

Kant's "Copernican Revolution"

51.

Kant's Moral Theory

52.

Burke—The Origins of Conservatism

53.

Hegel—History and Historicism

54.

Marx—Historical Materialism

55.

Marx—On Alienation

56.

Mill's Utilitarianism

57.

Kierkegaard and the Leap of Faith

58.

Schopenhauer—The World as Will and Idea

59.

Nietzsche—Perspectivism and the Will to Power

60.

Nietzsche—The Death of God, Morality, and
Self-Creation

61.

Introduction

62.

James's Pragmatism

63.

Freud's Psychology of Human Nature

64.

Freud's Discontents

65.

A.J. Ayer and Logical Positivism

66.

Max Weber and Legitimate Authority

67.

Husserl and Phenomenology

68.

Dewey's Critique of Traditional Philosophy

69.

Heidegger—Dasein and
Existenz

70.

Wittgenstein and Language Analysis

71.

The Frankfurt School

72.

Structuralism—Saussure and Lévi-Strauss

73.

Introduction

74.

Hayek and the Critique of Central Planning

75.

Popper—The Open Society and the Philosophy of
Science

76.

Kuhn's Paradigm Paradigm

77.

Quine—Ontological Relativism

78.

Habermas—Critical Theory and Communicative
Action

79.

Rawls's Theory of Justice

80.

Derrida and Deconstruction

81.

Rorty's Neo-Pragmatism

82.

Gouldner—Ideology and the "New" Class

83.

MacIntyre—The Rationality of Traditions

84.

Nozick's Defense of
Libertarianism

Great Minds of
the Western Intellectual Tradition, 3rd Edition
(84
lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Course No. 470

Taught by Dennis
Dalton, Alan
Charles Kors, Robert
H. Kane, Phillip
Cary, Louis
Markos, Darren
Staloff, Robert
C. Solomon, Jeremy
Adams, Jeremy
Shearmur, Kathleen
M. Higgins, Mark
Risjord, Douglas
Kellner

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For
3,000 years, mankind has grappled with life's most fundamental
questions.

What is real?

What should be the purpose of my life, and how should I
lead it?

Who or what is God?

How can there be freedom in a world determined by causal
laws?

When is it legitimate for one person to have power over
others?

What is justice? Beauty?

These are the crucial questions that thoughtful men and
women have pondered since civilization began. The most
brilliant minds in history focused on these questions—and
their search for answers has left us an intellectual legacy of
unsurpassed depth and richness.
The Intellectual
Adventure of a Lifetime

Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition
is a comprehensive survey of the history of Western
philosophy from its origins in classical Greece to the
present. The course is an 84-lecture, 12-professor tour of
Western philosophical tradition and covers more than 60 of
history's greatest minds.

This panoramic course is carefully designed and taught.
Each lecture is given by a university scholar who is not only
an expert in the topic but a gifted teacher, with classroom
talents certified by teaching awards and top rankings from
students.

It took 3,000 years for the debate chronicled in these
lectures to reach maturity. With this course, you can
encompass it by the end of next month.

Two Cities and the World They Created

The Western tradition is a blend of two outlooks that are
characteristic of the ancient cities that generated them:
Athens and Jerusalem.

Western monotheism and its philosophical entailments—faith
as an alternative to reason, mystic ecstasy, dogmatic
scripturalism, and the assumed equality of all souls in the
sight of God—ultimately derive from Jerusalem.

Athens is the city of inquiry, hubris, and emancipation.
The rationalism of Western culture, with its unprecedented
control over nature, is a perennial element in Western
philosophy, and it originates in Greece.

Jerusalem supplies the mythos of the West and its holy
text; Athens supplies the critical and self-critical spirit,
which animates the Promethean and perhaps Faustian history of
Western thought.

In this course, you see the synthesis and tension between
these two traditions over hundreds of years.

Two Sets of Issues—Three Millennia of Debate

Philosophy in the West has centered on two basic sets of
issues.

One: What is the world and what can we truly know about it
(metaphysics and epistemology)?

Two: How should we live (ethics, social and political
theory, and existentialism)?

You learn how different thinkers address these issues in
dramatically different ways. Yet you also see that this
variation is not random; entire philosophical epochs can be
defined by shared approaches to these basic questions, despite
a plethora of different solutions.

The course is in seven parts. Each part covers a specific
period in the history of philosophy. Each of the seven parts
begins with an introductory lecture to orient you to the
period and the philosophers and ideas you study in that part.

PART I: Classical Origins (Lectures 1 to 12)

Part I introduces the entire series and
the enduring problems of philosophy.

These lectures acquaint you with the Greek Pre-Socratics
(the world's first scientific thinkers) and the Sophists
(traveling teachers of rhetoric most widely seen through the
works of their leading enemy).

You then examine in detail the insights of three towering
figures: Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato's student,
Aristotle. Much of the rest of philosophy and Western thought
is a response to these three.

You study the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics of the late
Hellenistic and Roman worlds, as well as the Greek commentator
Polybius and the Roman statesman-philosopher Cicero.

This first part of the series is truly foundational. It
furnishes you with a solid ground on which you can build up
and extend your own understanding of the developments that
occur over millennia of philosophic debate. The aim of this
course is to show these developments to you as passages in a
narrative that records much disagreement but that contains
substantial coherence beneath its contending voices.

PART II: The Christian Age (Lectures 13 to 24)

In the introductory lecture to Part II,
you learn how we still stand on and are moved by the Greek and
biblical traditions, often not something of which we are fully
conscious.

This meeting of Athens and Jerusalem is exemplified first
by the influence of the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus on
Saint Augustine. The symbiosis of Athens and Jerusalem
continues during the High Middle Ages with Saint Thomas
Aquinas's synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian
theology and then branches off into different directions
represented by the mysticism of Meister Eckhart and the
Protestantism of Martin Luther and John Calvin.

PART III: From the Renaissance to the Age of Reason
(Lectures 25 to 36)

Part III marks the critical schism that
developed between the claims of faith and those of science.
You begin with the bold work of Machiavelli, who opened up new
ways of thinking about moral and political life. This is
contrasted to the work of statesman-saint Sir Thomas More and
his Utopia.

You examine the foundations of scientific thought in the
work of Galileo, Sir Francis Bacon, and René Descartes.

You return from science to political life, specifically the
era of the English Civil War and its echoes in the absolutist
political thought of Thomas Hobbes, who championed a coldly
scientific view of human nature.

You study the detached reverence toward being of Baruch
Spinoza, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, and
the skepticism of the influential Pierre Bayle.

The concluding lecture is a summation of the career and
significance of Isaac Newton, whose pathbreaking Principia
Mathematica gave the new science authoritative
expression.

PART IV: The Enlightenment and Its Critics
(Lectures 37 to 48)

Part IV covers the 17th and 18th centuries, capturing the
sense of breathless discovery found in the Enlightenment,
which reveled in the new freedom of human potential and
scientific expansion. This was also when the new bourgeoisie
found its voice in a demand for free markets, free speech, and
more political power.

This period marks the intellectual flowering that led to
the American Revolution.

This segment of the course, like the others, stresses the
inevitable linkage between a thinker's theory of knowledge and
theory of morality: what we can know determines what we can
know to be the right way to act. The lectures on John Locke
and David Hume develop this point with special cogency. Others
covered here include Vico, Mandeville, Bishop Berkeley, and
Adam Smith.

The Enlightenment stirred critics who feared its larger
moral, spiritual, and political effects. Of these doubters,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was among the most influential, making
him a fitting subject for the compelling lecture that
concludes this segment.

PART V: The Age of Ideology (Lectures 49 to 60)

Part V continues to explore the meaning of
the scientific revolution in our understanding of ourselves
and the many problems that it raises.

Is science the only source of true knowledge? If we have no
control over our actions because causal laws determine them,
then what is left of freedom? Choice? Right and wrong?

You study philosophers asking how far the scientific method
might be applied. Immanuel Kant responds to the challenges
raised by the new scientific consciousness in the metaphysical
and the moral arenas.

You study Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish
philosopher-statesman whose eloquent critiques of the French
Revolution made him an architect of modern conservatism, as
well as the giant of the liberal tradition, John Stuart Mill.

Lectures follow on G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy of history,
and Karl Marx's appropriation of a materialist version of
Hegelianism as part of his effort to develop scientific laws
of progress potent enough to overcome all human alienation.

Because causal determinism undermines the possibility of
freedom, choice, and virtue, this is a period of spiritual
turmoil as well as of material advance.

The final four lectures, on Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur
Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche, discuss three brilliant
exponents of this period's striving toward a new ground for
the human self and its aspirations.

PART VI: Modernism and the Age of Analysis
(Lectures 61 to 72)

Part VI introduces you to the philosophical struggles of
our own day.

Psychologists William James and Sigmund Freud still affect
us. James's philosophy of pragmatism seems characteristically
American, yet bears a striking resemblance to many of
Nietzsche's ideas. Freud applied the tools of science to the
philosopher's sanctum sanctorum—the mind itself.

Different 20th-century attempts to claim a new ground for
the understanding of self and society are explored. You study
the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, the existentialism of
Martin Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School's efforts to use
the ideas of Marx and Freud as a basis for rational moral and
political engagement, the structuralism of the linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss.

You conclude Part VI by studying Max Weber's sociology, the
ideas of A. J. Ayer, and the giant of the 20th century, Ludwig
Wittgenstein.

PART VII: The Crisis of Modernity (Lectures 73 to
84)

Part VII covers the work of late 20th-century philosophers
and theorists, beginning with Friedrich Hayek's critique of
the idea of central authority.

You examine Karl Popper's argument that scientific
hypotheses must remain "falsifiable," and the related but
distinct imperative for whole societies to remain "open."

You then analyze Thomas Kuhn's contribution in showing how
scientific knowledge works in "the real world."

You see how the communication-based theories of Jurgen
Habermas open up a new dimension in our understanding of the
human world.

You study Alvin Gouldner's ironic class-based critique of
Marxism.

Postmodernism and the work of the French philosopher and
literary theorist Jacques Derrida—a much-discussed ideology of
our own day—is explored sympathetically yet critically.

You conclude the series by studying the work of several
widely influential American philosophers—Willard Quine,
Richard Rorty, John Rawls, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Robert
Nozick.

Should I buy Audio or Video?

This course works well in any format. The DVD version is
illustrated with portraits and on-screen graphics highlighting
key points.

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