Log InLog InAncient to Modern · 10 modules · Department of Philosophy
Three thousand years of Western philosophy in ten tutorials, each hosted by a simulacrum of the thinker whose work defines the period. From the Pre-Socratics who asked what the world is made of, through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the Hellenistic schools, the rationalist and empiricist revolutions, Kant's critical philosophy, the nineteenth-century assault on reason, and the twentieth-century reinvention of the discipline. The student converses directly with Heraclitus about flux, with Plato about the Cave, with Hume about causation, and with Nietzsche about the genealogy of morals.
Hosted by the Heraclitus of Ephesus Simulacrum
The first philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus. Being and becoming, the one and the many, atoms and void.
Open module →Hosted by the Socrates (Composite) Simulacrum
The Socratic method, the elenchus, the equation of virtue with knowledge, and the trial that made philosophy dangerous.
Open module →Hosted by the Plato (Republic) Simulacrum
The Theory of Forms, the Allegory of the Cave, the tripartite soul, the just city, and the philosopher-king.
Open module →Hosted by the Aristotle (Ethics & Politics) Simulacrum
Substance and the categories, the four causes, virtue ethics, eudaimonia, and the politics of the good life.
Open module →Hosted by the Epicurus Simulacrum
Epicureans, Stoics, Cynics, and Sceptics: four schools, four answers to the question of how to live well in a world you cannot control.
Open module →Hosted by the René Descartes Simulacrum
The method of doubt, the cogito, Cartesian dualism, Spinoza's God-or-Nature, and Leibniz's monads.
Open module →Hosted by the George Berkeley Simulacrum
Locke's blank slate, Berkeley's idealism, and Hume's devastating scepticism about causation, the self, and the limits of reason.
Open module →Hosted by the Immanuel Kant Simulacrum
Transcendental idealism, the synthetic a priori, phenomena and noumena, the categorical imperative, and the kingdom of ends.
Open module →Hosted by the Arthur Schopenhauer Simulacrum
Schopenhauer's blind Will beneath all representation, and Nietzsche's genealogy that overturned the moral order.
Open module →Hosted by the Martin Heidegger Simulacrum
Heidegger's question of Being, Sartre's radical freedom, and Foucault's genealogy of power.
Open module →