The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition

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.

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.

How can we comprehend the very integrity of the universe and our place within it, if not by way of the most abstract relations?

How many kinds of stuff make up the cosmos? Might everything, in fact, be reducible to one kind of thing?

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.

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.

Rhetoric wins arguments, but it is philosophy that shows us the way to our humanity.

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.

If virtue can be taught, whose virtue will it be? A look at the Socratic recognition of multiculturalism and moral relativism.

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.

Hippocratic medicine did much to demystify the human condition and the natural factors that affect it.

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?

If true friendship is possible only between equals, how equal must they be—and with respect to what?

What sort of life is right for humankind, and what is it about us that makes this so?

The Stoics found in language something that would separate humanity from the animate realm, and that gave Rome a philosophy to civilize the world.

The Jewish Christians, Hellenized or Orthodox, defended a monotheistic source of law.

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.

Thoughts and ideas from the fathers of the early Christian Church culminated in St. Augustine, who explores humanity's capacity for good and evil.

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"?

Apart from trade schools devoted to medicine and law, the university as we know it did not come into being until 12th-century Paris.

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.

Thomas Aquinas's treatises on law would stand for centuries as the foundation of critical inquiry in jurisprudence.

From Petrarch in the south to Erasmus in the north, Humanistic thought collided with those seeking to defend faith.

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.