[Squishy] Salon 9 - Great Ideas in Philosophy - A Series

[Jonathan Jaffe]

Beginning next Thursday, the 14th of February at 7pm, we will begin a 
new salon. It will be a series on philosophy called," The Great Ideas 
of Philosophy," essentially an introduction to the subject by way of 
general survey. We have recently purchased the CD series recorded by 
the distinguished and entertaining Professor Daniel Robinson of 
Georgtown University. He's an excellent speaker exited about his field 
to the point of stuttering when he gets into topics that _really_ 
interest him. The course is a general survey in philosophy (see the 
description below) and is broken up into 50 half-hour lectures.

If you are like us and missed the opportunity to study philosophy while 
in college, you may find this opportunity fun. The format will be to 
listen to two half-hour lectures each week over a pot-luck dinner, then 
have an open discussion afterwards. We expect the average size of the 
group to range between 4 and ten each week, as people's schedules 
allow. It is not necessary to committ to coming each week, and we may 
arrange for the CDs to be available for those who might like to listen 
to them outside of the salon. There is also a syllibis we will make 
available. 

Please email us your tentative interests and any thoughts you have for 
making this more interesting to you, as well as to get directions to 
our house. We hope you decide to join us. Feel free to pass this email 
on to an interested friend.

Jonathan and Re-Cheng
The Great Ideas of Philosophy
Dr. Daniel Robinson
https://www.teachco.com/ttcstore/ShopProf.htm

1 - From the Upanishads to Homer
2 - What is it and did the Greeks invent it?
3 - Pythagoras and the divinity of number
4 - What is there?  The pre-Socratics and the ultimate stuff of the 
universe
5 - Is Medea guilty as charged? The Greek tragedians on man's fate
6 - Know thyself--Herodotus and the lamp of history
7 - Socrates on the examined life
8 - Plato's search for truth
9 - Can virtue be taught?
10 - Plato's Republic--man write large
11 - Mind and body--Hippocrates and the science of life
12 - Aristotle on the knowable
13 - Aristotle on friendship
14 - Aristotle on the perfect life
15 - Rome, the Stoics, and the rule of law
16 - The Stoic bridge to Christianity
17 - Roman Law--making a city of the once-wide world
18 - The light within--Augustine's idea of human nature
19 - Islam
20 - Secular knowledge--The idea of the university
21 - Facts and Values--The reappearance of experimental science
22 - Scholasticism and the theory of natural law
23 - Erasmus and Luther--Humanism and Fundamentalism
24 - Let us burn the witches to save them. . .
25 - Francis Bacon's "Great Instauration"--the authority of experience
26 - Descartes and the skeptical mind--the authority of reason
27 - Newton--the saint of science
28 - The social machine--Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the science of 
statecraft
29 - A Newtonian science of the mind - John Locke on human understanding
30 - No matter?  Never mind!  Berkeley and the challenge of materialism
31 - Skepticism and the pursuit of happiness--David Hume
32 - Common sense and divine providence--Thomas Reid and the Scottish 
School
33 - The play of mind and the salons of dissent--France and the 
Philosophes
34 - The Federalist Papers and the Great Experiment
35 - What is enlightenment?  Kant on freedom and the forms of knowledge
36 - Moral science and the natural world--Kant and the moral imperative
37 - The Phrenologist--early sciences of mind and brain 
38 - The idea of freedom
39 - Human history as the unfolding of the ideal--The Hegelians
40 - The world as the gift of genius--The Aesthetic Movement
41 - Dark corners of the soul--Nietzsche at the twilight
42 - The liberal tradition--J.S. Mill on liberty
43 - Survival of the fittest--Darwin and the purposes of nature
44 - Marxism--dead but not forgotten
45 - The Freudian world
46 - Yankee thought in a world of mystery--the radical William James
47 - William James's Pragmatism
48 - Helping the fly out of the bottle--Wittgenstein and the discursive 
turn
49 - Breaking the code--Alan Turing in the forest of wisdom
50 - Four theories of the good life--from saints to heroes to brains in 
vats