Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition | 13.34 GB
AVI | 128 kbps | 640 x 480 | 84 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture
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.
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.
Rapidshare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/245399189/DD-AK-KCea-GMotWIT.txt
