The Quest for Understanding: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2021
Pages: 424
Edition: 1
Copyright: 2021
Pages: 424
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The Quest for Understanding: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy is a fresh approach to teaching philosophy for a new millennium. It presents philosophy as a long conversation of people seeking to understand who we are, what the world is really like, and how we can build a better life.
Based on the author’s 20-plus years of teaching philosophy and seeing what works for students, the book is designed to connect with students to help them understand philosophy and why it matters to them, regardless of their major. Its straightforward conversational presentation of philosophy is easy for students, instructors, and general readers to use.
Key unique benefits:
- Never talks down to students but includes them in philosophy’s long conversation
- Gives a historical presentation that places philosophers in their historical context, showing how philosophers built on the ideas of their predecessors and responded to their times
- Avoids the disconnected and fragmented view offered by topically arranged textbooks by using a chronological, contextual approach
- Shows students how philosophy connects to their personal lives by explaining how innovations in philosophy have interacted with and changed history, leading to who we are today
- Focuses on explaining the ideas of the philosophers, allowing instructors to choose, at their option, primary texts from the plentifully available royalty-free sources
- Extensively covers vital areas of philosophy ignored by most textbooks, including phenomenology, social and political philosophy, postmodernism, feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and 21st century trends in philosophy
- Provides clear text unencumbered by bells and whistles and extraneous materials
The Quest for Understanding provides students with a clear and whole understanding of philosophy and its role in history and society. It shows that philosophy is not dry or obscure, but exciting and alive, and reveals how we are all philosophers.
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
Dr. Douglas Giles has taught philosophy at universities in the United States and United Kingdom for more than 20 years, sharing with students his passion for ideas. He earned his PhD from the University of Essex and has been a philosophy professor at Elmhurst University since 2007. His academic work is on social philosophy and recognition theory, his most recent book being Rethinking Misrecognition and Struggles for Recognition: Critical Theory Beyond Honneth. He also writes extensively about how philosophy applies to our daily lives. You can find him on the Web magazine InsertPhilosophyHere.com and the Internet radio station WorldFusionRadio.com.