Language: english
Tags: Philosophy
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Questions
What is Philosophy?
Theocracies
The Greeks
The Milesians’ Big Question
Pythagoras and Mathematics
Heraclitus and the World in Flux
Parmenides
Zeno’s Paradox of Motion
Empedocles and the Four Elements
The Atomists
Introducing Socrates
Cultural Relativism
Protagoras the Sophist
Socratic Dialogue
Condemned to Death
Plato and the Philosopher Kings
The Doctrine of Innatism
The Ideal Forms
The Parable of the Cave
Philosophical Experts
Aristotle the Teacher
Deductive or Syllogistic Logic
Induction and Science
Final Causes
Souls and Substances
The Ethics of Moderation
Taking the Blame
Platonist Dreamers and Aristotelian Realists
Interlude: A Brief History
The Epicureans – “Cultivate Your Garden”
The Stoics
Sceptics and Cynics
More Short History
Christianity Arrives
The Church Fathers
The Problem of Evil
St Anselm’s Proof
Abelard’s Nominalism
Aquinas and Natural Theology
Ockham’s Razor
Renaissance Humanism
Erasmus the Sceptic
Political Theorists
The Social Contract Theory
Bacon’s Philosophy of Science
Origins of Modern Philosophy
Scientific Doubt
Cogito Ergo Sum
Clear and Distinct Ideas
Descartes’ Legacy
Spinoza’s Questions
Spinoza’s Monism
Leibniz and the Monadology
Voltaire and the Enlightenment
Locke and British Empiricism
Berkeley’s Idealism
Hume and Empirical Scepticism
The Problem of Causation
Moral Scepticism
Rousseau’s Primitive State of Innocence
The General Will
Kant’s Response to hume
Mental Structures Precede Experience
Phenomenal and Noumenal Worlds
Categorical Imperatives
Hegel’s Dialectic
Dialectical Logic
Human Consciousness and Knowledge
Relative and Absolute knowledge
The State and the End of History
Schopenhauer’s Concept of Will
Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ
Beyond Good and Evil
Postmodern Forecast
Eternal Recurrence
Kierkegaard’s Christian Existentialism
The Leap of Faith
From Idealism to Materialism
Marx’s Dialectical Materialism
A Philosophy of Economics
Surplus Value
The End of Capitalism
The Prophet Marx
Utilitarianism: The Moral Science
Public Happiness
The Tyranny of the Majority and Pluralism
Origins of American Philosophy
No Government is the Best Government
Emerson: The Knowledge that Lies Beyond
Pragmatism
C.S. Peirce
Semiotics
William James
John Dewey
Democracy
Neo-Pragmatists
The Philosophical Avalanche
Introduction to 20th Century Philosophy
Origins of Phenomenology
Links to Psychology and Mathematics
The Method of Reductions
Heidegger: The Quest for Being
Nothingness and Inauthenticity
Sartre’s Existentialism
Freedom and Bad Faith
Authentic Political Life
Camus and the Absurd
Analytical Philosophy: The Problem of Mathematics
Frege and Demystified Maths
The Mystery Remains
Meaning and Reference
Russell’s Logical Atomism
Logical Analysis
The Logical Positivists
A.J. Ayer’s Logical Positivism
Testing for Meaning
Wittgenstein’s Logical Atomism
The Meaning of Meaning
Language Games
Private Thoughts
Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious
Ordinary Language Philosophy
The Ghost in the Machine
The Philosophy of Science
The Induction Method
Falsification Theory
Thomas Kuhn: The Paradigm Shift
Epistemological Anarchism
From Modern to Postmodern
The Three Big “IFS” of Postmodernism
Nietzsche: The Delusion of Truth
Language and Reality
A System of Signs
Structuralists
Derrida and Deconstruction
Logocentrism
The Inexistent Self
The End of Grand Narratives
Foucault: Power Plays
A World of Hyperreality
What About Science?
The Realist Viewpoint
Western Philosophy at a Glance
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
