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.
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.
Overview
About
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, is available at HeartlandPlays.com
Trailer
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....
31 min
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?...
33 min
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....
31 min
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....
33 min
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....
33 min
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....
32 min
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....
31 min
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....
30 min
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....
31 min
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....
31 min
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....
32 min
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....
30 min
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....
31 min
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....
32 min
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....
33 min
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....
32 min
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....
31 min
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....
32 min
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....
32 min
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."...
31 min
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....
31 min
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....
32 min
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....
31 min
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....
30 min
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....
31 min
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....
31 min
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....
31 min
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....
32 min
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....
31 min
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....
32 min
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....
30 min
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....
32 min
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?...
32 min
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....
30 min
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."...
31 min
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....
32 min
