Introduction to Philosophy 2300-MWŚN-wf

Course Topics
(Topics are prepared in surplus; some may be expanded while others may be omitted depending on the course progression.)
1. The distinction between philosophy, myth, poetry, and religion; Greek natural philosophy – the notions of arche, logos, physis, kosmos.
2. Socrates and the Sophists – the humanistic turn in Greek philosophy, ethical intellectualism, the problem of thinking.
3. Plato – philosophy as love of wisdom, the distinction between episteme and doxa, the theory of ideas, the Greek ideal of kalokagathia, love as a pedagogical force.
4. Aristotle – critique of Plato, ethics, types of knowledge: techne, phronesis, episteme.
5. Hellenistic philosophy: historical framework and schools of Hellenistic thought.
6. Late Antiquity and Neoplatonism; Augustine’s concepts of the soul, time, and creation; the relationship between faith and philosophy in the Middle Ages; Scholasticism and late medieval nominalism.
7. The response to nominalism: Descartes and the modern world; the problem of certainty, methodological skepticism, mind-body dualism.
8. Pascal – the human condition in the universe, the problem of infinity.
9. Hume – the origin of ideas, relations of ideas vs. matters of fact, the epistemological status of causal claims.
10. Kant – the four questions of philosophy, the Copernican revolution in thought, conditions of the possibility of science, theoretical and practical reason, Enlightenment.
11. Hegel – the structure of the system, the master-slave dialectic as a model of socialization, absolute spirit: the relationship between religion, art, and philosophy.
12. The "philosophies of suspicion": (I) Marx: materialism, alienation, Marxist philosophy as a form of Hegelianism; (II) Nietzsche: will to power, eternal return, the concept of truth; (III) Freud: the unconscious and the identity of the self.
13. Phenomenology: Husserl – critique of psychologism, the essence of phenomenology; Heidegger – the question of Being, a phenomenological concept of the human being.
14. Hermeneutics: Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur – understanding and the hermeneutics of suspicion.
15. Philosophical anthropology and philosophy of culture: Ernst Cassirer, Arnold Gehlen, Helmuth Plessner
16. Hannah Arendt – politics as anthropology, the human condition.
17. Elements of post-structuralism: Michel Foucault – archaeology and genealogy, knowledge and power.