TTC Video - Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida

TTC Video - Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida
Course No. 4790 (36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture) | English | 640x480 | XviD | 29.97fps 873kbps | Mp3 128kbps | 7.59 GB
Taught by Lawrence Cahoone | College of the Holy Cross | Ph.D., Stony Brook University
Genre: eLearning

What is reality? It's a seemingly simple question. But penetrate beneath its surface and the simplicity drops away, a succession of subsequent questions luring you deeper—to where even more questions await.
Ask yourself whether you can actually know the answers, much less be sure that you can know them, and you've begun to grapple with the metaphysical and epistemological quandaries that have occupied, teased, and tormented modern philosophy's greatest intellects since the dawn of modern science and a century before the Enlightenment.
During this rich period of philosophy, fascinating minds like Kant, Locke, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein (to name but a few) struggled to improve our understanding of the world against the backdrop of unprecedented scientific, technological, and historical developments. The resulting tension brought forth a vast range of questions:

* Is the scientific view of the world compatible with human experience? And is the issue made more difficult by concepts like free will, moral responsibility, and religion?
* What is the mind's place in a physical world? And is the mind itself different from the brain?
* Is there such a thing as objective truth? What are the implications of the answer for politics, science, religion, and other aspects of human civilization?

And, ultimately, the most important question of them all:

* What is the ultimate nature of reality, and what are the limitations on our knowledge of it?

To understand the answers to these questions—as well as the ideas of the modern philosophers who asked them—is to amplify not only your understanding of the Western intellectual tradition, but of history and science as well. And you will likely become an even more astute observer of contemporary trends and events by developing broader and deeper perspectives from which to observe them.

The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida offers you an introduction to the basics of modern and contemporary Western approaches to the philosophies of both reality (metaphysics) and knowledge (epistemology), right through the end of the 20th century, when some philosophers were even questioning the value of philosophy itself. Led by author and award-winning Professor Lawrence Cahoone of the College of the Holy Cross, these 36 lectures will take you on an engaging intellectual journey that encompasses prominent figures from all the major traditions of Western philosophy.

You'll explore the ideas behind modern philosophy's most important movements, including

* dualism, where much of modern philosophy began;
* rationalism, which views reason as the seat of all knowledge;
* empiricism, which views the senses as the source of all knowledge;
* idealism, where ideas formed the basis of the nature of reality;
* existentialism, the iconic 20th-century philosophy of alienation; and
* postmodernism, which radically refuses all notion of objective truth.

Just as important, you'll get a clear sense of how these and other movements fit into philosophy's broader progression—for example, the division into "analytic" and "continental" philosophy—to the present day.

Course Lecture Titles
1. Philosophy and the Modern Age
2. Scholasticism and the Scientific Revolution
3. The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes
4. Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism
5. Neo-Aristotelians—Spinoza and Leibniz
6. The Enlightenment and Rousseau
7. The Radical Skepticism of Hume
8. Kant's Copernican Revolution
9. Kant and the Religion of Reason
10. The French Revolution and German Idealism
11. Hegel—The Last Great System
12. Hegel and the English Century
13. The Economic Revolution and Its Critic—Marx
14. Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason
15. Nietzsche's Critique of Morality and Truth
16. Freud, Weber, and the Mind of Modernity
17. Rise of 20th-Century Philosophy—Pragmatism
18. Rise of 20th-Century Philosophy—Analysis
19. Rise of 20th-Century Philosophy—Phenomenology
20. Physics, Positivism, and Early Wittgenstein
21. Emergence and Whitehead
22. Dewey's American Naturalism
23. Heidegger's Being and Time
24. Existentialism and the Frankfurt School
25. Heidegger's Turn against Humanism
26. Culture, Hermeneutics, and Structuralism
27. Wittgenstein's Turn to Ordinary Language
28. Quine and the End of Positivism
29. New Philosophies of Science
30. Derrida's Deconstruction of Philosophy
31. The Challenge of Postmodernism
32. Rorty and the End of Philosophy
33. Rediscovering the Premodern
34. Pragmatic Realism—Reforming the Modern
35. The Reemergence of Emergence
36. Philosophy's Death Greatly Exaggerated

More info:
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=4790