Season 1

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  From the Upanishads to Homer

  Season 1 Episode 1 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Before ancient Greek civilization, the world hosted deep insights into the human condition but offered little critical reflection. Homer planted the seeds of this reflection.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Philosophy—Did the Greeks Invent It?

  Season 1 Episode 2 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The ancient Greeks were the first to objectify the products of their own thought and feeling and be willing to subject both to critical scrutiny. Why?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Pythagoras and the Divinity of Number

  Season 1 Episode 3 - Aired 1/1/2004

  How can we comprehend the very integrity of the universe and our place within it, if not by way of the most abstract relations?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  What Is There?

  Season 1 Episode 4 - Aired 1/1/2004

  How many kinds of stuff make up the cosmos? Might everything, in fact, be reducible to one kind of thing?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Greek Tragedians on Man’s Fate

  Season 1 Episode 5 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The ancient philosophers were only part of the rich community of thought and wonder that surrounded the world's first great dramatists and their landmark depth psychologies.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Herodotus and the Lamp of History

  Season 1 Episode 6 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Can history actually teach us? Herodotus looked at what he took to be certain universal human aspirations and deficiencies and concluded that indeed history could.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Socrates on the Examined Life

  Season 1 Episode 7 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Rhetoric wins arguments, but it is philosophy that shows us the way to our humanity.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Plato's Search For Truth

  Season 1 Episode 8 - Aired 1/1/2004

  If one knows what one is looking for, why is a search necessary? And if one doesn't know, how is that search even possible? Socrates versus the Sophists.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Can Virtue Be Taught?

  Season 1 Episode 9 - Aired 1/1/2004

  If virtue can be taught, whose virtue will it be? A look at the Socratic recognition of multiculturalism and moral relativism.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Plato's Republic—Man Writ Large

  Season 1 Episode 10 - Aired 1/1/2004

  This most famous of Plato's dialogues begins with the metaphor—or perhaps the reality—of the polis (community) as the expanded version of the person, with the fate of each inextricably bound to that of the other.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Hippocrates and the Science of Life

  Season 1 Episode 11 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Hippocratic medicine did much to demystify the human condition and the natural factors that affect it.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Aristotle on the Knowable

  Season 1 Episode 12 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Smith knows that a particular triangle contains 180 degrees because he has measured it, while Jones knows it by definition. But do they know the same thing?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Aristotle on Friendship

  Season 1 Episode 13 - Aired 1/1/2004

  If true friendship is possible only between equals, how equal must they be—and with respect to what?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Aristotle on the Perfect Life

  Season 1 Episode 14 - Aired 1/1/2004

  What sort of life is right for humankind, and what is it about us that makes this so?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Rome, the Stoics, and the Rule of Law

  Season 1 Episode 15 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The Stoics found in language something that would separate humanity from the animate realm, and that gave Rome a philosophy to civilize the world.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Stoic Bridge to Christianity

  Season 1 Episode 16 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The Jewish Christians, Hellenized or Orthodox, defended a monotheistic source of law.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Roman Law—Making a City of the Once-Wide World

  Season 1 Episode 17 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Roman development of law based on a conception of nature, and of human nature, is one of the signal achievements in the history of civilization.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Light Within—Augustine on Human Nature

  Season 1 Episode 18 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Thoughts and ideas from the fathers of the early Christian Church culminated in St. Augustine, who explores humanity's capacity for good and evil.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Islam

  Season 1 Episode 19 - Aired 1/1/2004

  What did the Prophet teach that so moved the masses? And how did the Western world come to understand the threat embodied in these Eastern "heresies"?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Secular Knowledge—The Idea of University

  Season 1 Episode 20 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Apart from trade schools devoted to medicine and law, the university as we know it did not come into being until 12th-century Paris.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Reappearance of Experimental Science

  Season 1 Episode 21 - Aired 1/1/2004

  There were really two great renaissances. The first occurred at Oxford in the 13th century: the recovery of experimental inquiry by Roger Bacon and others.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Scholasticism and the Theory of Natural Law

  Season 1 Episode 22 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Thomas Aquinas's treatises on law would stand for centuries as the foundation of critical inquiry in jurisprudence.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Renaissance—Was There One?

  Season 1 Episode 23 - Aired 1/1/2004

  From Petrarch in the south to Erasmus in the north, Humanistic thought collided with those seeking to defend faith.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Let Us Burn the Witches to Save Them

  Season 1 Episode 24 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Even in the time we honor with the title of Renaissance ran an undercurrent of a heady and ominous mixture of natural magic, natural science, and cruel superstition.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Francis Bacon and the Authority of Experience

  Season 1 Episode 25 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Francis Bacon would come to be regarded as the prophet of Newton and originator of modern experimental science.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Descartes and the Authority of Reason

  Season 1 Episode 26 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Descartes is remembered for "I think, therefore I am." With his work, the authority of revelation, history, and title was replaced by the weight of reason itself.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Newton—The Saint of Science

  Season 1 Episode 27 - Aired 1/1/2004

  In the century after Newton's death, the Enlightenment's major architects of reform and revolution defended their ideas in terms of Newtonian science and its implications.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Hobbes and the Social Machine

  Season 1 Episode 28 - Aired 1/1/2004

  As the idea of social science gained force, Hobbes's controversial treatise helped to naturalize the civil realm, readying it for scientific explanation.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Locke’s Newtonian Science of the Mind

  Season 1 Episode 29 - Aired 1/1/2004

  If all of physical reality can be reduced to elementary corpuscular entities, is the mind nothing more than comparable elements held together by something akin to gravity?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  No matter? The Challenge of Materialism

  Season 1 Episode 30 - Aired 1/1/2004

  When Berkeley reacted to Locke with an extravagant critique of materialism, he unwittingly reinforced claims of skeptics he meant to defeat.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Hume and the Pursuit of Happiness

  Season 1 Episode 31 - Aired 1/1/2004

  David Hume was perhaps the most influential philosopher to write in English, carrying empiricism to its logical end and thus grounding morality, truth, causation, and governance in experience.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Thomas Reid and the Scottish School

  Season 1 Episode 32 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Thomas Reid was Hume's most successful and influential critic, with a common sense psychology that was both naturalistic and compatible with religious teaching and which reached America's founders.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  France and the Philosophes

  Season 1 Episode 33 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The leading French thinkers of the 18th century—Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, and Diderot—appealed directly to the ordinary citizen, encouraging skepticism toward traditional authority.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Federalist Papers and the Great Experiment

  Season 1 Episode 34 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The extraordinary documents written in support of the proposed constitution represent a profound legacy in political philosophy.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  What Is Enlightenment? Kant on Freedom

  Season 1 Episode 35 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Here the limits of reason and the very framework of thought complete—and in another respect undermine—the very project of the Enlightenment.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Moral Science and the Natural World

  Season 1 Episode 36 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Kant traced the implications of a human life as lived in both the natural world of causality and the intelligible world of reason (where morality arises).

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Phrenology—A Science of the Mind

  Season 1 Episode 37 - Aired 1/1/2004

  In founding the now-discredited theory of phrenology, Franz Gall nevertheless helped define today's brain sciences.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Idea of Freedom

  Season 1 Episode 38 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The idea of freedom developed by Goethe, Schiller, and other romantic idealists forms a central chapter in the Long Debate over whether or not science has overstepped its bounds.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Hegelians and History

  Season 1 Episode 39 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Hegel's Reason in History and other works inspired a transcendentalist movement that spanned Europe, Great Britain, and the United States.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Aesthetic Movement—Genius

  Season 1 Episode 40 - Aired 1/1/2004

  By the second half of the 19th century, the House of Intellect was divided between two competing perspectives: the growing aesthetic concept of reality and the narrowing scientific view.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Nietzsche at the Twilight

  Season 1 Episode 41 - Aired 1/1/2004

  A student of the classics, Nietzsche came to regard the human condition as fatally tied to needs and motives that operate at the most powerful levels of existence.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Liberal Tradition—J. S. Mill

  Season 1 Episode 42 - Aired 1/1/2004

  When can the state or the majority legitimately exercise power over the actions of individuals? The modern liberal answer is set forth in the work of Mill, an almost unchallenged authority for more than a century.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Darwin and Nature’s “Purposes”

  Season 1 Episode 43 - Aired 1/1/2004

  From social Darwinism to sociobiology, the evolutionary science of the late 18th and 19th centuries dominates social thought and political initiatives.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Marxism—Dead But Not Forgotten

  Season 1 Episode 44 - Aired 1/1/2004

  After years of influence, the Marxist critique of society is now more a subtext than a guiding bible of reform.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Freudian World

  Season 1 Episode 45 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Marx, Darwin, and Freud are the chief 19th-century architects of modern thought about society and self—each was nominally "scientific" in approach and believed their theories to be grounded in the realm of observable facts.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  The Radical William James

  Season 1 Episode 46 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Mortally opposed to all "block universes" of certainty and theoretical hubris, James offered a quintessentially home-grown psychology of experience.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  William James's Pragmatism

  Season 1 Episode 47 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Working in the realm of common sense, James directed the attention of philosophy and science to that ultimate arena of confirmation in which our deepest and most enduring interests are found.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Wittgenstein and the Discursive Turn

  Season 1 Episode 48 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Meaning arises from conventions that presuppose not only a social world but a world in which we share the interests and aspirations of others.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Alan Turing in the Forest of Wisdom

  Season 1 Episode 49 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Turing is famous for breaking Germany's famed World War II Enigma code, but, as a founder of modern computational science, he also wrote influentially about the possibilities of breaking the mind's code.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Four Theories of the Good Life

  Season 1 Episode 50 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The contemplative. The active. The fatalistic. The hedonistic. There are good but limited arguments for each of these.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Ontology—What There "Really" Is

  Season 1 Episode 51 - Aired 1/1/2004

  From the Greek ontos, there is a branch of metaphysics referred to as ontology, devoted to the question of "real being." Ontological controversies have broad ethical and social implications.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Philosophy of Science—The Last Word?

  Season 1 Episode 52 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Should fundamental questions, if they are to be answered with precision and objectivity, be answered by science? We consider Thomas Kuhn's influential treatise on scientific revolutions.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Philosophy of Psychology and Related Confusions

  Season 1 Episode 53 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Psychology is a subject of many and varied interests but narrow modes of inquiry. Today cognitive neuroscience is the dominant approach, but other schools have reappeared.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Philosophy of Mind, If There Is One

  Season 1 Episode 54 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The principal grounds of disagreement within the wide-ranging subject of philosophy of mind center on whether the right framework for considering issues is provided by developed sciences or humanistic frameworks.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  What makes a Problem “Moral”

  Season 1 Episode 55 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Is there a “moral reality”? We examine especially David Hume’s rejection of the idea that there is anything “moral” in the external world.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Medicine and the Value of Life

  Season 1 Episode 56 - Aired 1/1/2004

  What guidance does moral philosophy provide in the domain of medicine, where life-and-death decisions are made daily?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  On the Nature of Law

  Season 1 Episode 57 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Philosophy of law is an ancient subject, developed by Aristotle and elaborated by Cicero. We see how natural law theory has evolved through the Enlightenment and the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Justice and Just Wars

  Season 1 Episode 58 - Aired 1/1/2004

  Theories of the “just war,” beginning with St. Augustine and including St. Thomas Aquinas, Francisco de Vittoria, and Francisco Suarez, set forth principles by which engaging in and conducting war are justified.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  Aesthetics—Beauty Without Observers

  Season 1 Episode 59 - Aired 1/1/2004

  The subject of beauty is among the oldest in philosophy, treated at length in several of the dialogues of Plato and in his Symposium, and redefined through history. What is beauty? Is there anything “rational” about it?

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown

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  God—Really?

  Season 1 Episode 60 - Aired 1/1/2004

  We consider various theological arguments for and against belief in God, including those of Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, and William James.

  Director: Unknown

  Writer: Unknown