The great ideas of philosophy
Contributors: Teaching Company
Series: Great courses on tape (Videorecording)
Publisher: Teaching Co.
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Springfield, VA
Language: eng
Format: [videorecording]
Number of pages: 1500
Subjects: Philosophy and science; Philosophy; Philosophy and social sciences; Theology; Theory of Knowledge; Ethics; Ontology; History
Description: These lectures offer a coherent and beautifully articulated introduction to the great philosophic conversation of the ages. They cover an enormous range of seminal thinkers and perspectives, but always from the vantage point of the enduring human questions: What can we know? How ought we to act? How should we order our life together?
Notes: Originally produced in 1997.

Fifty philosophy lectures of 30 minutes each by Daniel N. Robinson.

VHS format.
Table of contents: title: Contents of pt. 1: tape 1. From the Upanishads to Homer ; What is it and did the Greeks invent it? ; Pythagoras and the divinity of number ; What is there? : the Pre-Socratics and the ultimate stuff of the universe; title: tape 2. Is Medea guilty as charged? : the Greek tragedians on man's fate ; Know thyself : Herodotus and the lamp of history ; Socrates and the examined life; title: tape 3. Plato's search for truth ; Can virtue be taught? ; Plato's Republic : man writ large.; title: Contents of pt. 2: tape 1. Mind and body : Hippocrates and the science of life ; Aristotle on the knowable ; Aristotle on friendship ; Aristotle on the perfect life; title: tape 2. Rome, the Stoics, and the rule of life ; The Stoic bridge to Christianity ; Roman law : making a city of the once-wide world; title: tape 3. The light within : Augustine's idea of human nature ; Islam ; Secular knowledge : the ideas of the university.; title: Contents of pt. 3: tape 1. Facts and values : the reappearance of experimental science ; Scholasticism and the theory of natural law ; Erasmus and Luther : Humanism and Fundamentalism ; Let us burn the witches to save them; title: tape 2. Francis Bacon's Great instauration : the authority of experience ; Descartes and the skeptical mind : the authority of reason ; Newton : the saint of science; title: tape 3. The social machine : Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the science of statecraft ; A Newtonian science of the mind : John Locke on human understanding ; No matter? : Berkeley and the challenge of materialism.; title: Contents of pt. 4: tape 1. Skepticism and the pursuit of happiness : David Hume ; Common sense and divine providence : Thomas Reid and the Scottish School ; The play of mind and the salons of dissent : France and the Philosophes ; The Federalist Papers and the great experiment; title: tape 2. What is enlightenment? : Kant on freedom and the forms of knowledge ; Moral science and the natural world : Kant and the moral imperative ; The Phrenologists : early sciences of mind and brain; title: tape 3. The idea of freedom ; Human history as the unfolding of the ideal : the Hegelians ; The world as the gift of genius : the Aesthetic Movement.; title: Contents of pt. 5: tape 1. Dark corners of the soul : Nietzsche at the twilight ; The liberal tradition : J.S. Mill on liberty ; Survival of the fittest : Darwin & the purposes of nature ; Marxism : dead but not forgotten; title: tape 2. The Freudian world ; Yankee thought in a world of mystery : the radical William James ; William James's pragmatism; title: tape 3. Helping the fly out of the bottle : Wittgenstein and the discursive turn ; Breaking the code : Alan Turing in the forest of wisdom ; Four theories of the good life : from saints to heroes to brains in vats.