Lovers of knowledge, take my course for a journey through some of the greatest philosophy books ever written. Do you have what it takes to complete the course?
1) We begin in Ancient Greece, with the author of the "The Symposium", by Plato. Taking place at a drinking party, a group of Athenian thinkers reflect on the meaning of Eros, or desire. A famous speech by Socrates conveys that the greatest reason for love is philosophy. "The Symposium" may not be Plato's most influential work, but its graceful lyricism serves as a high mark in philosophical literature. Plato intended the dialogue to be fictitious, yet it could easily be mistaken for fact. In addition to Socrates' monologue on love, be sure to read Aristophenes' amusing fable of its origins. He drunkenly tells that humans are in a constant state of longing because we were split apart from our soul mates as punishment from Zeus following a revolt.
2) Your second required reading is a series of letters written by a man who served as an adviser to emperor Nero. Seneca's "Letters from a Stoic" was highly influential to those seeking to live by the principles of Stoicism. Originally addressed to his friend Lucilius, Seneca's letters offer much insight into the power of upright living. Whether you're a Stoic or not, a lot of the wisdom offered here can benefit you. Seneca was a big influence on Marcus Aurelius, whose "Meditations" rivals his own book as the penultimate source of Stoicism.
Many have been critical of the fact that Seneca preached Stoicism while living under the excess of riches that Emperor Nero supplied him. At the end of his life he allegedly got involved in a plot to assassinate the Emperor, and when Nero threatened to slay him he took his own life. It was never proven that he was involved in the plot though.
3) Christianity gained a lot of power after the fall of the Roman Empire. Written in the 5th century AD, St. Augustine's "The City of God" posed that people need government because they are sinful. At the time it was written, the fall of Rome had been blamed on Christianity by pagans. Augustine refuted this in his book, turning the blame on the pagans instead. Rome is likened to his idea of the "City of Man"- a sinful city of the past that represented the consequences of unchecked power. In contrast, "The City of God" represented the time to come, when people who transcended Earthly pleasures in favor of the Christian faith would come to govern the world. Augustine's eschatology was also pivotal to the development of millenarianism, a belief that predicted a thousand years of spiritual rebirth. It's interesting how the Middle Ages spanned about a thousand years and was spiritually (and politically) dominated by the Church.
4) Thomas Aquinas was another devout philosopher who had a big impact on Medieval thought. His Summa Theologica famously presented five arguments for the existence of God. Aquinas' arguments for the existence of God take up only two pages of the five volume work. It was meant to be read in its entirety by beginners of Christian theology. The first part serves as a thorough introduction to theology, followed by many chapters on ethics, law, and the sacraments. It had such a tremendous influence on Dante that the "Divine Comedy" has been called "the Summa in verse".
5) After the Middle Ages, philosophers began to take a more scientific approach to explaining the world. Spinoza's "Ethics" helped spark the Enlightenment by dehumanizing God and equating Him with nature. Spinoza was posthumously recognized as one of the great rationalists of his age. He used a style modeled on Euclidean geometry to explain his axioms, which is unique among philosophical writings. His pantheistic approach to explaining God gave people an alternative idea of creation: one in which God becomes less involved in individual affairs and only serves as a representation of nature, or the causation of everything we can physically observe. Along with Descartes, he helped start a trend in philosophy that took the focus away from theology and into scientific rationalism.
6) A psychological approach to philosophy began with David Hume, whose ideas are usually attributed (unfairly) to Kant. In A Treatise on Human Nature he proposed that causality lies only in the mind of the perceiver and not in the world of events. Many of the ideas in modern philosophy originated with Hume. To Hume, it wasn't the power of reason that shaped society and modeled our behavior, but our memories of sense-perceptions. He thought that epistemology was derived from our impressions of things and not the things themselves. Put another way, everything we know about something in the external world is an interpretation of it based on our experiences, not knowledge about the thing itself.
7) In "The World as Will and Representation", Arthur Schopenhauer agreed with Hume and Kant about the subjectivity of appearances, but a key difference was that he called for the "universal will", which meant that the truth about appearances could only be inferred by looking deep within oneself. He drew his ideas about the "universal will" from Eastern philosophy. Hume and Kant had argued that the appearances of things are only representations caused by our experiences. Schopenhauer agreed with this, but countered it by saying that everything still maintains an inner essence because the basic energies of the universe flow through everything, including oneself. He used Eastern concepts of unity and meditation to conceptualize the "universal will"- an omnipresent force flowing through everything that can serve as an objective reality for observers. The origin of his bleak pessimism - which he became well known for - lies within his view that most people can only see the appearances of things, and are therefore doomed to fight each other over them.
8) Absurdism is the belief that the search for meaning will always lead to failure because there is too much information in the universe for anyone to find certainty with. The cynical movement spiked after the "absurdity" of World War I, a time in which many people felt that life had become meaningless after all the destruction it was causing. Absurdist Albert Camus, author of "The Myth of Sisyphus" and "The Stranger", was an interesting character. He briefly dabbled in communism after being raised in poverty, only to reject it along with virtually every other belief. He even rejected his status as an existentialist despite being a champion for freedom, stating, "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked."
9) In Michel Foucault's 1961 treatise "Madness and Civilization", "The Great Confinement" meant institutions were created during the Age of Reason to separate the mad from the masses. Foucault's premise is that madness developed as a social construction meant to confine outsiders from a world of capitalist ambitions. During the Renaissance, madmen were often seen as wise, or being more in touch with the spiritual realm than others. During the Age of Reason they suddenly lost that status, and were instead confined to mental institutions and overseas colonies. Didn't someone from the movie "12 Monkeys" say consumers were the real lunatics?
10) Deconstruction is the idea that every word in a written language can only be understood in a system of differences (for example, good cannot be understood without evil). Derrida elaborated on this idea in works like "Of Grammatology" and "Writing and Difference". Derrida used deconstruction to criticize language, stating that speech and writing often dismantle each other due to differences in interpretations, lost translations, and the contexts in which words are used. The notion of language itself is overturned in his philosophy - he argues that it's just an arbitrary phenomenon that can never convey absolute meaning. Instead he believes that meaning can only be understood metaphysically through a transcendental origin; that something like language, God, consciousness, etc. can only act as a signifier of what this origin truly means. Put another way, due to the constraints of language we can't produce an adequate picture of meaning, so we always misrepresent it in some way. It's no wonder then that so many people lack meaning in their lives.
Physicist Stephen Hawking said that philosophy is dead; that, like religion, science has replaced it as the primary way of explaining the world. In my view, philosophy has always maintained an equilibrium between faith and reason, and will continue to do so for as long as the universe remains mysterious.
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