Great Ideas of Philosophy

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Additionally, Romanticism recognized that we become more aware of our essential nature through the arts.Through an understanding of that nature, we also become more aware of the kind of world we should try tobring about.A. A particularly convenient way to illustrate the tension and competing perspectives between the Romanticand Aesthetic movements can be found in a speech by Thomas Henry Huxley given at the founding of theUniversity of Birmingham and a reply to that speech by Matthew Arnold, one of the saints of the Aestheticmovement.1. Huxley raises a question that continues to animate discussions of higher education: Should a youngstermaking his way in the world study natural science or “two dead languages”? The answer he gave wasobvious. Greek and Latin might be proper if one intended to review books; the rest of the world wasthe domain of science.2. Huxley characterizes Matthew Arnold as a “Levite of culture” carrying with him a hieratic and remotepast into an age overtaken by scientific advances.B. Arnold replied by asking how human nature is to be understood. Can it be understood simply by digginginto its remote biological past?1. He quotes Darwin’s statement that our ancestor must have been a hairy quadruped, with pointed earsand a tail, “arboreal in nature.”2. Assume it to be so, says Arnold: There was yet something in that quadruped that “inclined him toGreek.” There must have been, because Greek is what he became!3. Consider what we achieve when we look inside ourselves and know that we are not complete, whenwe are driven to perfect ourselves in works of art and in the words of Aeschylus and Sophocles.4. The whole point of classical study, like the whole point of the Aesthetic movement, is not to preparefor the life of a book reviewer but to prepare for the life of a rational being.C. The whole point of culture, Arnold says, “is to make a rational being ever more rational” and to achievewhat Arnold famously refers to as “sweetness and light.” But this is the age of atomic and thermonuclearweaponry, and the National Football League, and vicious stock transactions on Wall Street. What are we tomake of “sweetness and light?”IV. Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice inspired the Victorian age to rediscover the power of the Gothic.A. In his “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” Ruskin included the “Lamp of Obedience”: In an age (such as hisown) that is without originality or creative force, the best thing to do is to copy the work of a better age.B. Ruskin contrasted the free play of form and invention in the Gothic with late-Renaissance symmetrical andgeometrical design, which he denounced as the “servile ornamentation of the Ninevite.”1. Renaissance decoration might have been produced by a stamping machine of his own century: Itreduces the craftsman to the status of machine.2. The Gothic is the free expression of those who have not been reduced to machinery.V. One of Oscar Wilde’s more devastating epigrams declared that “the birth of America was the death of art.”What Wilde was pointing to is the conflict between the ideal and the practical, between the world of spirit andthe world of things.A. A more discerning critic of America—Matthew Arnold—wrote two lengthy essays on culture in America.One was published before he had ever visited the United States; the second, after a tour of the States inwhich he was wined and dined at the White House and otherwise lionized as the ultimate arbiter of ‘highculture.”B. In his Last Words on America, Arnold rehearsed a judgment made earlier by Sir Lepel Griffin in print. Heconcludes that America has largely solved the political problem, the problem of poverty, and the socialproblem, but not the human problem.1. What Griffin is getting at is this: America is vast, rich, and getting bigger all the time. The problem isthat it is not interesting.2. What makes a nation interesting is its capacity to inspire awe, which it does chiefly through thecreation of beauty. And until America makes itself awe-inspiring by an attachment to beauty, it willremain uninteresting. For this reason, the gentle spirit will not find a home there.VI. The aesthetes of the 19 th century were not simply proclaiming the value of art but its creative power. They10©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership
insisted that our very character is formed by our practices and perceptions, that as these become moremechanical and tied to vulgarizing features of the world, we are transformed into something less than we were.Art, on the other hand, is the supreme instance of Schiller’s insight that “men are never so free as when they areat play”: Art is the free play of the spirit bringing into being what could not have been predicted in advance.Recommended Reading:Ruskin, J. The Stones of Venice, vol. 1. Smith, Eldeer & Co., 1853.Arnold, M. Culture and Anarchy. Yale University Press, 1994.Questions to Consider:1. Explain whether the “freedom” of the Gothic and the diminished freedom of the high Renaissance is obvious toyou.2. If architecture has a moral side, explain what contemporary architectural genres teach and affirm.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 11
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Daniel N. Robinson, Ph.D.Philosophy
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Lecture OneFrom the Upanishads to H
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E. The Upanishads would merge us wi
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2. Despite their oracles, priests,
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4. Looking at geometry, we are told
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E. The contribution of pre-Socratic
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of the mystery of earth itself impe
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Lecture SixHerodotus and the Lamp o
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Lecture SevenSocrates on the Examin
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Xenophon. Memorabilia. Cornell Univ
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II. A philosopher is engaged in the
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Lecture NineCan Virtue Be Taught?Sc
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Lecture TenPlato’s Republic⎯Man
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Annas, J. “Classical Greek Philos
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III. The dominant school of Greek m
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1. Epistemonikon is a special featu
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Timeline800-600 B.C.E. ............
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1705...............................
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1873...............................
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Functionalism: The view that consci
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Tabula rasa: A blank slate. In the
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progress in one of its most summoni
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John Locke (1632-1704): Physician a
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The Great Ideas ofPhilosophy, 2 nd
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Table of ContentsThe Great Ideas of
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Lecture ThirteenAristotle on Friend
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C. Aristotle is recovering the Home
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III. The problem of conduct is then
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C. The Stoic account relies on the
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Lecture SixteenThe Stoic Bridge to
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Recommended Reading:Bede. A History
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III. Roman law successfully permitt
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Lecture EighteenThe Light Within⎯
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B. Augustine approaches the problem
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B. Very early, the Islamic commitme
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Lecture TwentySecular Knowledge⎯T
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IV. The third great institutional c
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1. Scholasticism was an attempt to
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Lecture Twenty-TwoScholasticism and
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E. Further, to the intellectual vir
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historical volumes tell Florentines
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Lecture Twenty-FourLet Us Burn the
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1. First, the courts required a doc
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650-850 C.E. ......................
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1794...............................
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Apatheia: Freedom from pathos and s
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ut cannot know what it is. Ultimate
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Biographical NotesAeschylus (525-45
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Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771)
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Socrates (c. 469-399 B.C.): Greek p
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Daniel N. Robinson, Ph.D.Philosophy
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Scope:The Great Ideas of Philosophy
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B. This expansion, however, does no
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1. This standard essentially rules
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Lecture Twenty-SevenNewton⎯The Sa
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Lecture Twenty-EightHobbes and the
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Page 123 and 124: Lecture ThirtyNo Matter? The Challe
Page 125 and 126: Lecture Thirty-OneHume and the Purs
Page 127 and 128: Lecture Thirty-TwoThomas Reid and t
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Page 133 and 134: Lecture Thirty-FourThe Federalist P
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Page 139 and 140: Lecture Thirty-SixMoral Science and
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Page 147 and 148: Apatheia: Freedom from pathos and s
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Page 151 and 152: Biographical NotesAeschylus (525-45
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Page 163 and 164: C. Though his system would be mocke
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Page 169: Lecture FortyThe Aesthetic Movement
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Page 177 and 178: Lecture Forty-ThreeDarwin and Natur
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Page 183 and 184: Lecture Forty-FiveThe Freudian Worl
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Page 189 and 190: Lecture Forty-SevenWilliam James’
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Page 195 and 196: Timeline800-600 B.C.E. ............
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Page 201 and 202: Functionalism: The view that consci
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Page 214 and 215: Lecture Forty-NineAlan Turing in th
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B. The inclination to classify is a
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Lecture Fifty-TwoPhilosophy of Scie
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V. These debates illustrate a far l
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1. The two had in common the idea t
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Questions to Consider:1. What does
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C. Locke and others emphasized that
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Lecture Fifty-FiveWhat Makes a Prob
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B. Kant suggests that the moral law
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1. Proponents have argued that so m
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Lecture Fifty-SevenOn the Nature of
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2. So far as it can coexist with th
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3. Slavery is commonplace in all of
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3. Does the just-war theorist have
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B. The quadrivium comprised arithme
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2. He argues that the former is pre
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1. The objects of the knowable worl
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etween a world of beauty and one of
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⎯⎯⎯. On Free choice of Will.
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Herodotus. The Persian Wars. G. Raw
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———. Toward a Science of Huma
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