The Quest for Understanding: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy

ISBN-13: 9781792457609 / Angielski / Twarda / 1753

Douglas Giles

Spis treści

• CHAPTER 1. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
• What Is Philosophy? Philosophy Is a Quest
• Philosophy in Context—Philosophy Is a Conversation
• Necessary Caveats
• All the God Talk...

  CHAPTER 2. PLATO

• The Greek Cultural Context
• Plato's Writings
• Defining Justice
• What Is Knowledge?
• Plato's Forms
• Learning the Forms
• The Allegory of the Cave
• Plato's Divided Line
• Morality and the Person
• Morality and the City-State
• Plato's Influence

  CHAPTER 3. ARISTOTLE

• How Objects Exist
• How We Know Objects
• How Objects Change
• Form and Matter
• Potentiality and Actuality
• The Four Cases
• The Good Life
• On Community and Government
• After Plato and Aristotle

  CHAPTER 4. THE HELLENIC AND ROMAN ERAS

• Late Hellenic Philosophy
• Stoicism and the Roman Empire
• Philo
• Plotinus
• Augustine
• The Inner Teacher and Illumination
• The Human Will

  CHAPTER 5. THE NOT-SO-DARK AGES

• The Transition From Antiquity to Medieval
• The Scholastic Debate Over Faith Versus Reason
• The Controversy Over Universals
• The Islamic Renaissance
• The Passive and Active Intelligence
• The Great Chain of Being
• Political Structure

  CHAPTER 6. FROM THE MEDIEVAL ERA TO THE RENAISSANCE

• John Duns Scotus
• William—The Forerunner of Modern Philosophy
• Theory of Knowledge
• The Contingent Universe
• The Renaissance
• Trade and Exploration
• Art
• Philosophy
• Science
• Religious Conflict

  CHAPTER 7. DESCARTES, THE METHODICAL PHILOSOPHER

• The Cartesian Method of Philosophy
• Descartes' Four Rules
• Doing Science Beside the Fire
• What Am I?
• The Wax Example
• The Clear and Distinct Idea and the External World
• Descartes' Influence

  CHAPTER 8. THE "SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION" AND EPISTEMOLOGY

• Francis Bacon
• Thomas Hobbes' Materialist Epistemology
• Hobbes's Physics of Knowledge
• The Basis of Perception
• Newton Captures the Universe
• John Locke's Epistemology
• Primary and Secondary Qualities
• Locke In Summary

  CHAPTER 9. THE RISE OF MODERN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

• Hobbes's Social Bargain
• Individual and Political Bodies
• The Political Arguments in Hobbes's Time
• Hobbes's Thought Experiment
• Locke's Theory of a Divine Right to Change Kings
• The Political Background for Locke's Philosophy
• Locke's Natural Right of Property
• Locke's State of Nature Thought Experiment
• Locke's Right to Revolt

  CHAPTER 10. THE RISE OF RADICAL POLITICAL CRITIQUE

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau's General Will
• Mary Wollstonecraft and the Birth of Feminism
• The American Experiment

  CHAPTER 11. BERKELEY: MATTER DOESN'T MATTER

• Exposing Our Unthinking Assumptions
• Rethinking Primary and Secondary Qualities
• Matter Doesn't Matter
• What Cause Our Ideas? Berkeley's Simple Solution

  CHAPTER 12. HUME: THE END OF PHILOSOPHY?

• Hume's Epistemology
• A Science of the Mind
• Reasoning About Our Ideas
• Two Empty Ideas
• Causality and Science
• The Source of Morality
• The Dead End For Philosophy and Science?

  CHAPTER 13. KANT

• Kant's Way Out of Hume's Dead End
• Kant's Copernican Revolution
• The Varieties of Judgments
• The Transcendental Method
• Time and Space
• The Categories of Understanding
• Kant's Active Mind
• The Three Transcendental Ideas of Pure Reason
• Self
• Cosmos
• God
• Kant's Legacy

  CHAPTER 14. GERMAN IDEALISM AND HEGEL

• Beyond Kant
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• German Idealism and Romanticism
• Hegel and the Grand System
• Hegel's Approach to Knowledge: Philosophy in Context
• Hegel's Historicist System
• Recognition

  CHAPTER 15. KARL MARX, THE MISUNDERSTOOD DIAGNOSTICIAN

• The Era of Revolutions?
• The March of Class Struggle
• The Problem with the Bourgeois Class
• Human Alienation: Capitalism's Greatest Harm
• The Structure of Society

  CHAPTER 16. MORAL PHILOSOPHY

• Kant's Moral Law
• Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism
• John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism

  CHAPTER 17. THE EXPLOSION OF INDIVIDUALISM

• Kierkegaard
• We Are Beings Who Must Choose and Act
• Objective Knowing Versus Subjective Knowing
• The Spheres of Life
• Nietzsche
• Toward a New Concept of Truth
• Toward a New Humanity
• Transcendentalism

  CHAPTER 18. AMERICAN PRAGMATISM

• Charles Sanders Pierce
• The Fixation of Belief
• Science as Public Meaning
• William James
• The Case Value of Beliefs
• A Right to Believe
• We Have Free Will
• John Dewey
• Instrumentalism and Truth
• Education

  CHAPTER 19. PROCESS VERSUS POSITIVISM: PHILOSOPHY'S GREAT DIVIDE

• Positivism: The Birth of Analytical Philosophy
• Bertrand Russell
• The Logical Positivists
• Process: Continental Philosophy
• Bergson Explains the Analytical/Continental Divide
• Duration—Bergson's Philosophy of Time
• Experiencing Process
• Self, Life, and Elan Vital
• Bergson's Legacy
• Alfred North Whitehead's Natural Theology
• The Quest to Understand the Ultimate Categories
• Against the Metaphysical Assumption of Reductionist Materialism
• Process and Reality
• Two Different Quests for Understanding?

  CHAPTER 20. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

• The Early Wittgenstein: The Tractatus
• The Middle Wittgenstein: The Blue and Brown Book Lectures
• The Later Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations

  CHAPTER 21. PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIALISM

• Edmund Husserl
• Bracketing Perception
• Immersion in Experience
• Layers of Consciousness
• Max Scheler
• Edith Stein
• Martin Heidegger
• A Phenomenology of Being
• Being-in-the-World
• Regions, Involvements, and the Everyday
• Thrownness, Authenticity, and Anxiety
• Karl Jaspers
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Simone de Beauvoir
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  CHAPTER 22. ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

• Philosophy of Language
• Structuralism
• Ordinary Language Philosophy
• Philosophy of Mind
• Analytical Political Philosophy
• Liberalism
• Analytical Marxism
• Analytical Epistemology

  CHAPTER 23. TEARING DOWN PHILOSOPHY: POSTMODERNISM

• The Hazy Beginnings of Postmodernism
• Jacques Derrida
• Michel Foucault
• Jean-Francois Lyotard
• Jean Baudrillard
• Richard Rorty

  CHAPTER 24. CONTINENTAL SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

• Martin Buber—I and You
• Neo-Marxism
• The Frankfurt School
• Hannah Arendt—Against Totalitarianism
• Emmanuel Levinas—The Ethics of The Other
• Jürgen Habermas
• Axel Honneth—Recognition Theory
• Struggles for Recognition
• Freedom and Socialism

  CHAPTER 25. RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY: FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

• The First Wave—Human Rights
• The Second Wave—Liberation
• The Third Wave—Intersectional Feminism
• Complacency and Backlash
• Intersectionality
• Expanding Feminist Issues
• Gender and the Feminist Critique of Science
• Feminist Morality

  CHAPTER 26. PHILOSOPHY OF RACE

• W.E.B. duBois—Double Consciousness
• Franz Fanon—Black Skin
• James Baldwin
• Cornell West
• Lewis Gordon
• Derrick Bell—Critical Race Theory
• Charles W. Mills
• Other Notable Philosophers of Race

  CHAPTER 27. CRISES OF THE NEW CENTURY

• Philosophy of Science
• Environmental Ethics
• Postcolonial Philosophy
• Globalization and Technology
• Nonheteronormative Philosophy

  APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGY OF IMPORTANT EVENTS AND PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS