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The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition

Season 1
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 questions: What can we know? How ought we to act? How should we order our life together?
202360 episodesTV-PG
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Episodes

  1. S1 E1 - From the Upanishads to Homer
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    Before ancient Greek civilization, the world hosted deep insights into the human condition but offered little critical reflection. Homer planted the seeds of this reflection.
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  2. S1 E2 - Philosophy—Did the Greeks Invent It?
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    Discover how and why the ancient Greeks were the first to objectify the products of their own thoughts and feelings and be willing to subject both to critical scrutiny.
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  3. S1 E3 - Pythagoras and the Divinity of Number
    September 20, 2023
    30min
    TV-PG
    How can we comprehend the very integrity of the universe and our place within it, if not by way of the most abstract relations?
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  4. S1 E4 - What Is There?
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    How many kinds of stuff make up the cosmos? Might everything, in fact, be reducible to one kind of thing?
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  5. S1 E5 - The Greek Tragedians on Man’s Fate
    September 20, 2023
    29min
    TV-PG
    The ancient philosophers were only part of the rich community of thought and wonder that surrounded the world's first great dramatists and their landmark depth psychologies.
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  6. S1 E6 - Herodotus and the Lamp of History
    September 20, 2023
    30min
    TV-PG
    Can history actually teach us? Herodotus looked at what he took to be certain universal human aspirations and deficiencies and concluded that indeed history could.
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  7. S1 E7 - Socrates on the Examined Life
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    Rhetoric wins arguments, but it is philosophy that shows us the way to our humanity.
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  8. S1 E8 - Plato's Search For Truth
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    If one knows what one is looking for, why is a search necessary? And if one doesn't know, how is that search even possible? Socrates versus the Sophists.
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  9. S1 E9 - Can Virtue Be Taught?
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    If virtue can be taught, whose virtue will it be? A look at the Socratic recognition of multiculturalism and moral relativism.
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  10. S1 E10 - Plato's Republic—Man Writ Large
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    This most famous of Plato's dialogues begins with the metaphor—or perhaps the reality—of the polis (community) as the expanded version of the person, with the fate of each inextricably bound to that of the other.
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  11. S1 E11 - Hippocrates and the Science of Life
    September 20, 2023
    29min
    TV-PG
    Hippocratic medicine did much to demystify the human condition and the natural factors that affect it.
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  12. S1 E12 - Aristotle on the Knowable
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    Smith knows that a particular triangle contains 180 degrees because he has measured it, while Jones knows it by definition. But do they know the same thing?
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  13. S1 E13 - Aristotle on Friendship
    September 20, 2023
    30min
    TV-PG
    If true friendship is possible only between equals, how equal must they be—and with respect to what?
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  14. S1 E14 - Aristotle on the Perfect Life
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    What sort of life is right for humankind, and what is it about us that makes this so?
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  15. S1 E15 - Rome, the Stoics, and the Rule of Law
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    The Stoics found in language something that would separate humanity from the animate realm, and that gave Rome a philosophy to civilize the world.
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  16. S1 E16 - The Stoic Bridge to Christianity
    September 20, 2023
    29min
    TV-PG
    The Jewish Christians, Hellenized or Orthodox, defended a monotheistic source of law.
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  17. S1 E17 - Roman Law—Making a City of the Once-Wide World
    September 20, 2023
    29min
    TV-PG
    Roman development of law based on a conception of nature, and of human nature, is one of the signal achievements in the history of civilization.
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  18. S1 E18 - The Light Within—Augustine on Human Nature
    September 20, 2023
    30min
    TV-PG
    Thoughts and ideas from the fathers of the early Christian Church culminated in St. Augustine, who explores humanity's capacity for good and evil.
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  19. S1 E19 - Islam
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    What did the Prophet teach that so moved the masses? And how did the Western world come to understand the threat embodied in these Eastern "heresies"?
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  20. S1 E20 - Secular Knowledge—The Idea of University
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    Apart from trade schools devoted to medicine and law, the university as we know it did not come into being until 12th-century Paris.
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  21. S1 E21 - The Reappearance of Experimental Science
    September 20, 2023
    30min
    TV-PG
    There were really two great renaissances. The first occurred at Oxford in the 13th century: the recovery of experimental inquiry by Roger Bacon and others.
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  22. S1 E22 - Scholasticism and the Theory of Natural Law
    September 20, 2023
    30min
    TV-PG
    Thomas Aquinas's treatises on law would stand for centuries as the foundation of critical inquiry in jurisprudence.
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  23. S1 E23 - The Renaissance—Was There One?
    September 20, 2023
    30min
    TV-PG
    From Petrarch in the south to Erasmus in the north, Humanistic thought collided with those seeking to defend faith.
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  24. S1 E24 - Let Us Burn the Witches to Save Them
    September 20, 2023
    31min
    TV-PG
    Even in the time we honor with the title of Renaissance ran an undercurrent of a heady and ominous mixture of natural magic, natural science, and cruel superstition.
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  25. S1 E25 - Francis Bacon and the Authority of Experience
    September 20, 2023
    30min
    TV-PG
    Francis Bacon would come to be regarded as the prophet of Newton and originator of modern experimental science.
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Details

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Subtitles
None available
Producers
The Great Courses
Cast
Daniel N. Robinson
Studio
The Great Courses
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