Course Syllabus: History of Western Philosophy

Topic 0: Course Introduction

An orientation to the journey ahead — what philosophy is, why its history matters, and how the topics in this course build on one another across twenty-five centuries.

Topic 1: The Pre-Socratics

Philosophy begins not with answers but with a radical change in the kind of question being asked — replacing mythological explanation with reasoned inquiry into the nature of reality.

Topic 2: Socrates and the Sophists

The focus of philosophy shifts from the cosmos to the human being — from "what is the world made of?" to "how should I live?"

Topic 3: Plato

Plato is the first systematic philosopher and the pivot around which all of Western philosophy rotates.

Topic 4: Aristotle

Aristotle is philosophy's great synthesizer and systematizer — he simultaneously dismantles Plato's world of separate Forms and rebuilds a richer account of substance, nature, knowledge, and the good life.

Topic 5: Hellenistic Philosophy

After Alexander the Great, three great schools emerge to answer the question pressing on every individual: how do I live well in a world I cannot control?

Topic 6: Medieval Philosophy

Medieval philosophy is where some of philosophy's sharpest problems (universals, existence, necessary being, reason vs. revelation) were fought over with great precision.

Topic 7: Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy

The Renaissance dissolves the medieval synthesis, and a new science of nature forces a complete rethinking of what knowledge is and how to get it.

Topic 8: The British Empiricists

Where the rationalists grounded knowledge in innate ideas and pure reason, the empiricists insist that all knowledge comes from experience.

Topic 9: Kant

Kant is the hinge of modern philosophy — woken by Hume's skepticism, he attempts a complete restructuring of epistemology.

Topic 10: German Idealism and Hegel

Kant's successors eliminate the mysterious "thing-in-itself" by making reality fully rational and fully knowable — leading to Hegel and his dialectical account of history, Spirit, and freedom.

Topic 11: 19th-Century Responses

Hegel's grand system provoked four of the nineteenth century's most important philosophers into furious, contrasting responses.

Topic 12: Analytic Philosophy

At the turn of the twentieth century, a new style of philosophy emerges that turns away from grand metaphysical systems toward the logical analysis of language and thought.

Topic 13: Continental Philosophy

A parallel tradition turns to lived experience, embodiment, and the question of being itself — Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas.

Topic 14: Later Analytic Philosophy

The late Wittgenstein's rejection of his own early theory transforms analytic philosophy — while Quine, Rawls, and philosophy of mind take it in new directions.

Topic 15: Postmodernism and Contemporary Thought

Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Rorty each question the very foundations of the Western philosophical project — universal reason, objective truth, and grand historical narratives.