The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition - The Great Courses

Written by The Great Courses
Read by Professor Daniel N. Robinson
Format: MP3
Unabridged

Grasp the important ideas that have served as the backbone of philosophy across the ages with this extraordinary 60-lecture series. This is your opportunity to explore the enormous range of philosophical perspectives and ponder the most important and enduring of human questions - without spending your life poring over dense philosophical texts.
Professor Robinson guides you through more than 2,000 years of philosophical thinking and gives you a coherent, comprehensive, and beautifully articulated introduction to the great conversation of philosophy. Every lecture contains substance that can change your view of the world and its history.
You’ll journey from the early philosophical ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; chart the origins of Christian philosophy and investigate the Islamic scholars who preserved and extended Greek thought during the Middle Ages; and venture through Enlightenment contributions to philosophy, from Francis Bacon to Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Adam Smith.
Then shift your attention to the modern era, where you see groundbreaking ideas like psychoanalysis, pragmatism, and nihilism, as well as the collision between the inherently social understanding of meaning created by Wittgenstein, the vastly different estimation of human thought developed by the code-breaking genius Alan Turing, and the subtle response to him made by the American philosopher John Searle.
While the lectures cover an enormous range of key thinkers and ideas, they always focus on the most important ideas. The result is a course that gives you everything you need to finally grasp humanity’s exciting philosophical history - without years of intense academic study and piles of dense reading.

NOTE: The accompanying reference material is available as a PDF.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
01 From the Upanishads to Homer
02 Philosophy—Did the Greeks Invent It?
03 Pythagoras and the Divinity of Number
04 What Is There?
05 The Greek Tragedians on Man’s Fate
06 Herodotus and the Lamp of History
07 Socrates on the Examined Life
08 Plato’s Search for Truth
09 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?