An Introduction to Greek Philosophy | Date: 12 April 2011, 02:52
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The first philosophers in Western history—the ancient Greeks—asked the most fundamental questions about human beings and their relationship to the world. More than 2,500 years later, the issues they pondered continue to challenge, fascinate, and instruct us.
Is reality stable and permanent or is it always changing? Are ethical values like justice and courage relative? Or are values "absolute"—simply and forever right and true? What is justice? What is happiness? How shall we best live our lives?
An Introduction to Greek Philosophy beckons you to join this eternal discussion. For that is what this subject truly is: a conversation among thinkers that has continued through the centuries and remains accessible to us today. You find it constantly stimulating, sometimes controversial, and nearly always remarkably relevant.
[b]A Hunger for Reasons, not Myths or Beliefs[/b]
Professor David Roochnik has organized this series of 24 lectures as a "dialectical" approach (the word comes from the Greek dialegesthai: to converse). The philosophers are presented as if they were participating in a conversation. In this way, the course unfolds in a manner similar to the actual development of Greek philosophy.
In this course, you study the development of Greek philosophy, meet its major thinkers, and explore the issues and ideas that concerned them. For example the first real philosophers were the Presocratics—literally, the philosophers who lived before Socrates. They included Thales of Miletus (585 B.C.E.–?), Anaximander (610–546), Anaximenes (approx. 550), Xenophanes (approx. 570) and Pythagoras (approx. 570–500).
The Presocratics rejected myth and divine inspiration—such as had been embodied in the works of Homer and in Hesiod's creation story, the Theogony—as valid explanations of reality. Instead, they insisted that true understanding always requires a logos, a rational explanation (hence such English words as "psychology" and "biology").
The Presocratics were concerned with issues such as identifying the arche or "Being": the thing that is the origin of all other things. They also introduced sophistic relativism, the notion that truth, goodness, and all other values were relative, depending entirely on the person or group that held them. This concept would become a major point of debate for the Greeks and for the ages.
[hide=Course Lecture Titles][list][*]1. A Dialectical Approach to Greek Philosophy
[*]2. From Myth to Philosophy—Hesiod and Thales
[*]3. The Milesians and the Quest for Being
[*]4. The Great Intrusion—Heraclitus
[*]5. Parmenides—The Champion of Being
[*]6. Reconciling Heraclitus and Parmenides
[*]7. The Sophists—Protagoras, the First "Humanist"
[*]8. Socrates
[*]9. An Introduction to Plato's Dialogues
[*]10. Plato versus the Sophists, I
[*]11. Plato versus the Sophists, II
[*]12. Plato's Forms, I
[*]13. Plato's Forms, II
[*]14. Plato versus the Presocratics
[*]15. The Republic—The Political Implications of the Forms
[*]16. Final Reflections on Plato
[*]17. Aristotle—"The" Philosopher
[*]18. Aristotle's Physics—What is Nature?
[*]19. Aristotle's Physics—The Four Causes
[*]20. Why Plants Have Souls
[*]21. Aristotle's Hierarchical Cosmos
[*]22. Aristotle's Teleological Politics
[*]23. Aristotle's Teleological Ethics
[*]24. The Philosophical Life
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