Course overview

An eclipse, a guess about water, and the birth of explanation by argument.

Everything flows, or nothing can change; the atomists split the difference.

Philosophy turns to human affairs, and Athens executes its greatest questioner.

The Forms, and the most famous image in philosophy: the cave.

Why be just, what the soul is, and a city ruled by philosophers.

Logic invented, nature explained by four causes, Parmenides answered at last.

Happiness as a life's work, the political animal, and Aristotle's indefensible views faced squarely.

Diogenes heckles Alexander, Zeno builds a porch into a cosmos, and a slave and an emperor agree on what freedom is.

Pleasure misunderstood for two millennia, atoms against the fear of death, and the strange peace of suspending judgment.

The One, the ladder of being, and Plato remade as mysticism.

Stolen pears, a voice in a garden, and Greek philosophy carried into Christianity.

A senator consoled by Philosophy herself, an Irish maverick at a Frankish court, and a proof of God from a definition alone.

A self-taught Persian prodigy imagines a man adrift in the void who still knows he exists.

Does fire burn cotton? Islam's greatest theologian says only God acts; a Córdoban judge answers a lifetime later.

A refugee physician in Cairo guides the perplexed by saying only what God is not.

Philosophy's most notorious love affair, the war over whether "humanity" exists, and the invention of the university.

The quiet ox of Paris drafts the fullest peace treaty between Aristotle and faith — then calls it all straw.

A subtle Scot, a razor against excess entities, and the slow uncoupling of reason from faith.

Philologists unmask a forged empire, Machiavelli teaches princes how not to be good, and Montaigne, reading a newly printed Greek skeptic, asks the question that will haunt the moderns: what do I know?

A canon stops the Sun, a Florentine reads the book of nature in mathematics and is made to recant it, and a Lord Chancellor writes the manifesto for organized science.

A man doubts the entire world into nothing, hits one thing that cannot be doubted, and rebuilds from there — only to be asked, by a princess, how a ghost can move a machine.

If thought is only matter in motion and "reasoning is but reckoning," what holds a society of such machines together? A sword, and a mortal god.

A lens-grinder cursed by his community proves, in the manner of geometry, that everything that exists is one infinite substance — and that to understand this is blessedness.

The universe is made of infinitely many windowless souls, kept in perfect step by God, in the best world a perfect mind could choose — with Pascal betting the opposite.

The mind is a blank page written on by experience; and if all we ever meet is our own ideas, perhaps there is no matter behind them at all.

The gentlest man in Edinburgh follows empiricism to its end and finds that cause, self, and the rising of tomorrow's sun cannot be proved by reason at all.

Voltaire crushes the infamous thing, an Encyclopédie tries to hold all of knowledge, and one dissenter insists that everything called progress has only forged new chains.

The Revolution puts the Enlightenment on trial, and the argument over it — tradition against rights, and whose rights count — invents the modern political world.

To rescue science from Hume, a punctual professor proposes that the mind does not copy the world but constructs it — and walls off reality-in-itself forever.

From the one fact of our freedom, Kant derives a moral law binding on all rational beings, the absolute dignity of persons, and a plan for ending war.

Kant's heirs abolish the unknowable thing-in-itself, and Hegel sets all of reality marching as Spirit coming to know itself through history, struggle, and freedom.

A blind will driving a world of suffering, and a lonely Dane who stakes everything on a leap the System can never make.

Philosophy comes down from heaven to the factory floor, and turns from interpreting the world to changing it.

The greatest happiness of the greatest number, the harm principle, and the case — made with Harriet Taylor — for the equality of women.

God is dead, morality is a weapon of the weak, and a hammer is taken to every value the West has trusted.

Self-reliance, civil disobedience, Darwin's shockwave, and a new world's answer: an idea is true if it works.

A new logic supersedes Aristotle, a letter shatters a life's work, and philosophy learns to dissolve problems by analyzing their logical form.

One philosopher writes two revolutions: first that language pictures the world, then that meaning is simply use.

A verification principle promises to eliminate metaphysics for good, and then quietly eliminates itself.

What marks science off from pseudoscience: that it can be falsified, or that it lives and dies by revolutions?

The dogmas of empiricism fall, the ghost is chased from the machine, and three pages of Gettier break the definition of knowledge.

Four women refuse to leave morality to feeling, and bring virtue, attention, and the trolley problem back to philosophy.

A new method for describing lived experience from the inside, and the embodied, perceiving self it uncovers.

The most influential philosophy of the century, asking what it means to be — written by a man who joined the Nazis, a fact met here head-on.

Existence precedes essence, we are condemned to be free, one is not born but becomes a woman, and one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The banality of evil, the human capacity to begin, and the discipline of attention to affliction.

How reason itself became a tool of domination, and the culture industry a velvet cage.

The human subject decentered, meaning destabilized, and power discovered everywhere.

Design a society from behind a veil that hides your own place in it, and you discover what justice requires.

Names that grip their objects across all possible worlds, meanings that aren't in the head, and an infinity of worlds as real as our own.

Can a machine think, can we explain consciousness, and is there something it is like to be you that no science can capture?

A drowning child, a famous violinist, and future generations press the question of how far our obligations reach.

The voices the tradition silenced return to remake the questions of justice, knowledge, and who counts.

Testimony, expertise, echo chambers, and AI-generated unreality test whether a connected world can still know anything.

Climate, AI, and existential risk; the global turn; and the six threads walked from Thales to today.