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This course explores major trends and developments in Western intellectual history, including its origins, implications, and criticisms from a variety of philosophical perspective and analysis of related cultural phenomena that may include: science, religion, literature, and art.
Iliad is the tale of 51 days’ fighting in the tenth year of the Trojan War. The hero Achilles fell into anger with the Greeks, due to conflict with the king Agamemnon over a female slave. Achilles thus refused to go to the battlefield for the Greeks, and the Greeks suffered great loss during the war without the leadership of Achilles. Achilles returned to the battlefield only after the death of his closest friend Patroclus, who was killed by the Trojan leader Hector. Achilles killed Hector to revenge, but eventually returned Hector’s body to Hector’s father Priam, as Priam reminded him of his own father, another old man who will never see his son again.
The Bible is the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. The Christian Bible consists of the Old Testament and the New Testament, with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox versions of the Old Testament being slightly larger because of their acceptance of certain books and parts of books considered apocryphal by Protestants. The Hebrew Bible includes only books known to Christians as the Old Testament. New American Standard Bible is an English translation of the Bible. It is known for preferring a literal translation style that generally preserves the structure of the original language when possible.
Volume I and Volume II provide a completely new translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. The works collected include some early writings, Rules for the direction of the mind, The world, Treatise on man, Discourse on the method, Optics, Principles of philosophy, Comments on a certain broadsheet, Description of the human body, The passions of the soul, Meditations on first philosophy, Objections and replies, Letter to Father Dinet, The search for truth. Volume III contains 207 of Descartes' philosophical letters.
This work by Kant is a foundational study of the nature and scope of human reason as it relates to metaphysics and epistemology. It is divided into two parts, a Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, followed by a Transcendental Doctrine of Method. The Elements deals with the sources of human knowledge, whereas the Method draws up a methodology for the use of “pure reason” and its a priori ideas. Both are “transcendental” in that they are presumed to analyze the roots of all knowledge and the conditions of all possible experience. This book is an English translation of the work in both the 1781 and 1787 editions.
This masterpiece by Hegel examines the course of experience in progress from ephemeral matter-of-fact appearance, through mounting evidence of an underlying coherency, to a comprehensive result so critically thought through that the inner logical dynamic of the real is manifest. The book discusses sense-certainty, perception, force and understanding, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, and absolute knowledge. Focusing on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, physics, ethics, history, religion, perception, consciousness, and political philosophy, Hegel develops his concepts of dialectic, absolute idealism, ethical life, and Aurhebung in this book, which marked a significant development in German idealism.
