Great Ideas: Fragments of Western Civilization

Introduction

Section I. The Ancient World
I.1 Homer, Iliad (Barbarism)
I.2 Homer, Odyssey (Art and Drama)
I.3 Aeschylus, Oresteia (Democracy and Drama)

Section II. Ancient Philosophy
II.1 Plato Apology (Heroic View of Socrates)
II.2 Aristophanes, The Clouds (Another View of Socrates)
II.3 Plato, The Republic (Why Be Just?)
II.4 Plato, The Republic (Allegory of the Cave)
II.5 Plato, The Republic (Art and Censorship)
II.6 Aristotle, Physics (Philosophy of Nature)
II.7 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Virtue, the Good Life)
II.8 Aristotle, Poetics (Art)

Section III. Jews, Romans, Christians
III.1 The Hebrew Bible
III.2 Genesis (Creation, Abraham)
III.3 Job (Problem of Suffering)
III.4 Romans: Plutarch, Lives ( Julius Caesar)
III.5 Romans: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Stoicism)
III.6 Christianity: Matthew, I Corinthians (Beatitudes, Christian Love)
IV. The Medieval Synthesis
IV.1 The Fall of Rome
IV.2 Augustine, Confessions (God and Time)
IV.3 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Arguments for God’s Existence)
IV.4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Immortality of the Soul)
IV.5 Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy (Hell)

V. The Modern Revolution
V.1 Renaissance, The Scientific Revolution
V.2 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Doubt, Dualism)
V.3 William Shakespeare, Hamlet (To Be or Not to Be)
V.4 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Limits of Modernity)
V.5 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathon (The State)
VI. The Enlightenment
VI.1 “Liberation Philosophy”
VI.2 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Monodology (Best of All Possible Worlds)
VI.3 François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Candide (Problem of Evil)
VI.4 David Hume, Enquiry (Skepticism)
VI.5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (Education)
VI.6 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (Women)
VI.7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Transcendental Idealism)
VI.8 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (German Idealism)
VI.9 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals  and John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism
VII. The Counter-Enlightenment
VII.1 Disenchantments
VII.2 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground (Pessimism)
VII.3 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (Faith)
VII.4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Nihilism)
VII.5 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Evolution)
VII.6 Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Repression, The Irrational)
VII.7 James Joyce, Ulysses (Stream of Consciousness)
VII.8 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New Beginnings)