The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition

Explore the entire western philosophical tradition in this comprehensive introduction to the topic taught by a member of the philosophy department at Oxford.

• By This Professor
• 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?