Lawrence Cahoone – The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida

Description

Lawrence Cahoone – The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida download, Lawrence Cahoone – The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida review, Lawrence Cahoone – The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida free
Lawrence Cahoone – The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida
The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida
Get an introduction to the contemporary Western approaches to the philosophies of both reality and knowledge, led by an author and award-winning professor, as you explore the ideas behind modern philosophy’s most important movements.
LECTURE (36)
01:Philosophy and the Modern Age

Preview the course, beginning with the scientific and social changes of the 17th through 19th centuries that forced all major philosophers to develop dramatically new views. Then see how the 20th century unleashed three diverging pathways for Western philosophers, each producing its own wave of this radically new thought….
02:Scholasticism and the Scientific Revolution

Grasp how the Scientific Revolution arrived in a world already reeling from religious and social upheaval, fragmenting the medieval Aristotelian-Christian view of the cosmos. Can philosophers discover a way to follow God and the new science at the same time?…
03:The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes

Learn how Descartes forged the first and most influential solution. He posited a private self-consciousness, with its own innate ideas, as the foundation of knowledge, with reality fundamentally divided into both matter and mind (or soul). The former is the realm of science; the latter is that of religion, psychology, and ethics….
04:Locke’s Empiricism, Berkeley’s Idealism

See how Locke’s denial of innate ideas created the modern empiricist view of knowledge as based solely on experience, instigating centuries of empiricist-rationalist debate. Later, Berkeley inaugurated modern idealism with his conclusion that empiricism must deny matter’s very existence; there are only minds, with experiences programmed by God….
05:Neo-Aristotelians-Spinoza and Leibniz

Follow the attempts of two thinkers to integrate religion, philosophy, and science without straying from Aristotelian foundations. For Spinoza, everything is one substance-God. For Leibniz, every substance has its own mental properties and “view” of the universe, with God binding all together….
06:The Enlightenment and Rousseau

Watch the Enlightenment’s self-conscious heralding of modernity, where science, freedom, and cosmopolitan education will mean progress in the face of superstition, authority, and tradition. The greatest dissenter is Rousseau, who argued that progress in art, science, and the economy yields no progress in morality or happiness….
07:The Radical Skepticism of Hume

Watch Hume drive empiricism to the extreme of radical skepticism, dismissing all metaphysics as nonsense. If we only know through experience, all we know is experience, so science cannot rationally say that the sun will rise tomorrow or even that it probably will….
08:Kant’s Copernican Revolution

Learn how Kant tried to find an answer to Hume, without which neither science nor philosophy can claim general knowledge of reality. His reasoning changed philosophy forever as he argued that the human mind does not passively receive our experience of the world but actively constructs it from sensation….
09:Kant and the Religion of Reason

Kant’s saving of science came at a price-the ability to know things as they appear but never “things in themselves.” Reason, he argues, cannot prove-nor can science disprove-God, the soul, or free will. Kant protected faith from contradiction and created a different path for the German Enlightenment….
10:The French Revolution and German Idealism

See how the French Revolution and Kant inspired German idealists like Fichte and Schelling to invent a new kind of philosophy, with spirit-hence, freedom-as the basis of nature, not the other way around….
11:Hegel-The Last Great System

Grasp Hegel’s synthesis of Fichte’s idealism and Schelling’s panentheism with world history as the story of God’s coming to self-consciousness. We can follow the “dialectic” of partial, incomplete historical perspectives up to the perspective of the Whole, that is, of God….
12:Hegel and the English Century

Watch how the Industrial Revolution, the rise of European imperialism, and the philosophy of Hegel inspired other thinkers-including Comte, Spencer, Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and, especially, Darwin and Marx-to create historical explanations for the development of mind and society….
13:The Economic Revolution and Its Critic-Marx

The socially wrenching birth of industrial capitalism, with its massive human costs, provoked many critics, but the most influential was a young German follower of Hegel, Karl Marx. See how his ideas became the 20th century’s greatest challenge to Western liberalism….
14:Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason

Kierkegaard remains the most radical philosophical critic of reason itself. Follow his rejection of Hegel and any attempt to “rationalize” the human condition. For Kierkegaard, the human spirit is subjected to fundamental choices that cannot be reconciled, particularly religious faith, which is intrinsically irrational and higher than reason….
15:Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality and Truth

Meet the most violent critic of the Judeo-Christian and, to some extent, Greek values of Western civilization. Nietzsche declared that morality makes the individual sick. The modern decline of religion leaves only the “will to power” and the need for a new set of values. His deepest concern was what those values would be….
16:Freud, Weber, and the Mind of Modernity

Besides Hegel, Marx, and possibly Nietzsche, two other German-speaking authors created much of the background for analyzing the unique form of life evolving in the 20th century. Listen as Freud’s and Weber’s arguments that modern society will generate increasing discontent were taken up by later philosophers….
17:Rise of 20th-Century Philosophy-Pragmatism

Watch as late 19th-century philosophy begins to fragment into the three subcultures that would characterize philosophy’s next century: analytic, continental, and pragmatic. The last would become the indigenous American tradition, exemplified by its two major contributors, Charles Peirce and William James….
18:Rise of 20th-Century Philosophy-Analysis

Grasp how Frege’s invention of the first new logic since Aristotle, combined with Russell’s and Moore’s attack on the dominant idealism of the age, led to a new approach, “analytic” or “Anglo-American” philosophy. It would become the dominant philosophical approach in all English-speaking countries….
19:Rise of 20th-Century Philosophy-Phenomenology

Watch as Husserl tried to formulate a new ideal philosophy of meaning on the basis of a nonempiricist, holistic analysis of human experience. His solution changed all subsequent European philosophy, liberating the investigation of lived experience from empiricism, psychology, and natural science….
20:Physics, Positivism, and Early Wittgenstein

Witness the logical positivists’ reaction to the new physical view of the world offered by special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, and Hubble’s discovery of the universe’s expansion. They declared that reality is knowable only by science’s “verifiable” constructions of sense data. As the young Wittgenstein wrote, beyond those limits we should be “silent.”…
21:Emergence and Whitehead

Learn about both British Emergentism, which argued for a nonreductive metaphysics of science, and the work of Alfred North Whitehead, the one 20th-century philosopher to take up the 17th-century goal of a metaphysical system consistent with physics to explain the place of mind, values, and God….
22:Dewey’s American Naturalism

Encounter the work of the most prominent American philosopher of the 20th century. Most famous as a philosopher of education, John Dewey called for a transformation of philosophy on pragmatic and naturalist principles and wrote in virtually every area of philosophy. To many Americans, Dewey was philosophy….
23:Heidegger’s Being and Time

Learn how one of the most important philosophical books of the 20th century created the basis for modern existentialism, as Martin Heidegger put Husserl together with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to forge a new kind of phenomenology that seeks the meaning of human existence….
24:Existentialism and the Frankfurt School

Witness European philosophers exploring individual alienation in mass culture as the modern Western world swirls in the turmoil of World War II. The German Frankfurt school merged Marx with Freud to find domination in reason itself. The French combined existentialism with Marxism. And Heidegger-without apology then or later-joined the Nazi Party….
25:Heidegger’s Turn against Humanism

Watch Heidegger’s later work take a new, decidedly anti-humanist direction. He called for a rejection of Western metaphysics-which expressed the triumph of technology and individualism dictating to Being-and instead asked that humans patiently “listen” to the call of Being….
26:Culture, Hermeneutics, and Structuralism

See culture and language seize a prime position in philosophical thought with Ernst Cassirer’s neo-Kantian view of culture, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics (amplifying Heidegger’s claim that language is the “house of Being”), and Ferdinand de Saussure’s and Claude Levi-Strauss’s creation of structuralism….
27:Wittgenstein’s Turn to Ordinary Language

Plunge into perhaps the most influential work of 20th-century philosophy as Ludwig Witt-genstein rejected his own earlier positivism to declare that linguistic meaning is dictated by its use, not by logic but by the contextual social activities in which sentences operate. Philosophical problems are caused by ripping terms out of their practical context….
28:Quine and the End of Positivism

See how Willard Van Orman Quine, who studied with the logical positivists, undermined their view. He showed that their distinction between truths of reason and truths of experience, borrowed from Kant, was a mistake….
29:New Philosophies of Science

With the decline of positivism, see the appearance of new interpretations of scientific knowledge. Learn about Popper’s rejection of the idea that science seeks to confirm its theories, Davidson’s formulation of an alternative to reductionism, and Kuhn’s provocative view of scientific revolutions….
30:Derrida’s Deconstruction of Philosophy

Learn about the most famous of the French postmodernists and his “deconstruction” of the history of Western philosophy. All writing (or sign-use, in general), Jacques Derrida asserted, must involve the pretense that the meanings of signs can be controlled, a pretense he vigorously denied….
31:The Challenge of Postmodernism

Derrida’s work and that of kindred French thinkers Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard created postmodernism. This movement’s radical rejection of modern philosophy’s central notions-and perhaps even philosophy itself-joined with a view of postmodern society as no longer requiring a “metanarrative” or foundational philosophy….
32:Rorty and the End of Philosophy

Sample the thinking of the most famous American contributor to philosophical postmodernism. Richard Rorty argued that the search for the foundations of “knowledge” -little more than whatever the verification procedures of society say it is-is a bankrupt enterprise. Traditional philosophy, according to Rorty, is well forgotten….
33:Rediscovering the Premodern

Learn how a series of 20th-century philosophers-including Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair MacIntyre-called for reincorporating premodern notions to supplement modernity. For if modern philosophy is indeed at a dead end, might not its departure from premodern thought be responsible?…
34:Pragmatic Realism-Reforming the Modern

See how pragmatism enjoyed a resurgence as a means of preserving the philosophical search for realist truth in the absence of foundationalism. Encounter a variety of attempts at nonfoundational epistemology, as thinkers like Habermas, Putnam, Margolis, and Campbell demonstrated this pragmatic renaissance….
35:The Reemergence of Emergence

While various applications of pragmatism resurfaced in the theory of knowledge, there was also a noticeable return of the metaphysical doctrine of emergence. Witness this return not only in the work of philosophers of science but also in science itself, exemplified by the late 20th-century interest in “complexity.”…
36:Philosophy’s Death Greatly Exaggerated

After the unprecedented philosophical radicalism of the 20th century, the question of philosophy’s future still remains. Sample some of the most likely approaches by which philosophy might successfully integrate-and find common ground among-an increasingly complex array of human activities….
DETAILS
Overview
Explore the foundations of modern and contemporary Western approaches to reality and knowledge with The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida. Guided by award-winning Professor Lawrence Cahoone, these 36 lectures take you on an engaging intellectual journey that encompasses prominent figures like Locke, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger-intellectual radicals whose ideas completely revolutionized how we look at and understand the world around us.
About
Lawrence Cahoone
“The Great Courses deeply challenged my skills in teaching philosophy, while making it fun too.” 
ALMA MATER Stony Brook University
INSTITUTION College of the Holy Cross
Dr. Lawrence Cahoone is Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where he has taught since 2000. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. A two-time winner of the Undergraduate Philosophy Association Teaching Award at Boston University who has taught more than 50 different philosophy courses, Professor Cahoone is not only a skilled teacher, but also an author. With a background in recent European, American, and social and political philosophy, as well as interests in postmodernism, metaphysics, and the latter’s relation to the natural sciences, he has written:

The Orders of Nature
Cultural Revolutions: Reason versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and Jihad
Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics
The Ends of Philosophy: Pragmatism, Foundationalism, and Postmodernism
The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-Culture

He edited From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology and his play, Wise Guys: A Philosophical Comedy