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The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition

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About this listen

Grasp the important ideas that have served as the backbone of philosophy across the ages with this extraordinary 60-lecture series. This is your opportunity to explore the enormous range of philosophical perspectives and ponder the most important and enduring of human questions - without spending your life poring over dense philosophical texts.

Professor Robinson guides you through more than 2,000 years of philosophical thinking and gives you a coherent, comprehensive, and beautifully articulated introduction to the great conversation of philosophy. Every lecture contains substance that can change your view of the world and its history.

You'll journey from the early philosophical ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; chart the origins of Christian philosophy and investigate the Islamic scholars who preserved and extended Greek thought during the Middle Ages; and venture through Enlightenment contributions to philosophy, from Francis Bacon to Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Adam Smith.

Then shift your attention to the modern era, where you see groundbreaking ideas like psychoanalysis, pragmatism, and nihilism, as well as the collision between the inherently social understanding of meaning created by Wittgenstein, the vastly different estimation of human thought developed by the code-breaking genius Alan Turing, and the subtle response to him made by the American philosopher John Searle.

While the lectures cover an enormous range of key thinkers and ideas, they always focus on the most important ideas. The result is a course that gives you everything you need to finally grasp humanity's exciting philosophical history - without years of intense academic study and piles of dense reading.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2004 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2004 The Great Courses
Philosophy Thought-Provoking Greece Nonfiction
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Most relevant
Dr. Robinson is a remarkable lecturer, a brilliant storyteller, and a skilled logician. It's taken me a month to traverse all 60 lectures, but it was well worth the effort in my estimation. 30 days to consume a lifetime of wisdom is a good bargain. More importantly, it's great to know that at least one man cares enough about The West to make sure we all remember what makes it worth caring about.

Masterful, Enthralling, Enlightening

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Truly inspiring lectures.
Professor Robinson took you in a journey through philosophy like never before.
Amazing !!!

Philosophy taught wonderfully

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I came to buy this course, wishing to gain an overview into philosophy as a whole (for a too in-detailed study would probably go into the hundreds of hours), and this satisfied that desire. offering nice snippets of the history of philosophy, the important figures involved, and ideas generating from them, its provided a wonderful start point for which philosophies and figures I can choose to further study. if you're after something similar to myself, this will cover everything you need. I have no doubt this will warrant multiple listens.

Really solid starting point into philosophy.

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It's a wonderfully worry and thorough journey through a complicated and diverse subject matter, and yet, for the layman like myself, I feel I have a better grasp of Philosophy, and it's oh so colourful history.

Bravo!!

A wonderful overview of a complicated subject

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I found this series stimulating, entertaining, and intelligently incisive in catching catching the nub of so many great thinkers and tracing the development and reworking of so many ideas through ever changing contexts. I've been reading and debating philosophy for 35 years on and off and this series of lectures has refreshed my heart for philosophical inquiry. Many thanks.

A fabulous presentation

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