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Greetings and welcome to the first part of a History of Philosophy in a Year! In these weeks we will be looking at the work of some of the early Greek philosophers (weeks 1 and 2) and of Plato (weeks 3 to 5). Please do not be intimidated by the volume of primary material - I promise you, I won't be asking you to read it all. I shall be referring to a small number of specific texts in the course of each session, and inviting you to explore one or two of them in small discussion groups. The remaining texts are there for you to explore at your leisure, following your own interest in particular areas of inquiry. I will ask all participants, whether online or in person to have these texts available on laptop or phone for easy reference during the sessions. You, are of course welcome to print them out for yourselves if that would be more helpful.
For the first week we'll be looking at authors 1 - 6. May I ask you first to read the introduction to the Presocratics, and then to look at and be prepared to share your comments with others on one text, presenting the doctrine of either Anaxagoras or Democritus or Empedocles. Use the following general questions to guide your reading:
(1) what exactly does the author seem to be trying to say?
(2) where does his method match up with or diverge from modern standards of reason or scientific enquiry?
(3) which points raised by the text still have relevance for our own thinking about the world today? Write down your thoughts and be ready to share them in your small group."
Good luck with the reading and I look forward to seeing you next week.
Welcome to the next leg of the whistle stop tour through the History of Philosophy. Please find below the texts for the next five sessions (covers 600 years). There are once more far more texts available than we can possibly get through, but I hope that the extra texts will allow you to explore and fill out what we cover in the classes. Each of the two sets of texts (for Aristotle and for the Hellenistic philosophers) is divided into four parts (labelled 'part 1' etc.). We shall be dividing the texts upas follows:
Week One Aristotle Part 1 (Physics)
Week Two Aristotle Parts 2 and 4 (The Soul and God)
Week Three Aristotle Part 3 (Ethics)
Week Four Hellenistic Parts 1 and 2 (Stoics and Epicureans)
Week Five Hellenistic Parts 3 and 4 (Plotinus and the Sceptics)
As before, take time to read the brief introduction to the appropriate section, and the select two or three of the texts that look interesting to you to read carefully. Make a note of what you think the author is saying, make a note of anything that does not seem to make much sense or seems difficult, and make your own preliminary evaluation of the author's position on the topic. Then bring your notes to the class. (This is the general instruction for all the sessions). Have fun!
Dear all,
Welcome to our Medieval Philosophy introduction. Please find below a selection of texts for the first two weeks.
Do not be alarmed! Read the introduction for each week and choose one text to focus on for yourself that you find interesting. In the course of each session we will be breaking into groups to present to one another some of the texts that we have looked at, sobe prepared to share what you have found.
Ask yourself the general questions to guide you:
What is the author trying to say?
Why is it important to them?
What does this text say to me?
See you next Wednesday.
John M sj
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Dear All,
Herewith a copy of the texts we shall be looking at over weeks 3-5 of this part of the course. I have also put up an introductory chapter from the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, which gives amore thorough sense of context than we will be able to explore in our sessions.
The texts are broken down into three topic areas, each with their own introduction, and with some notes to guide you through each selection. Do not try to read each text in detail before the relevant weekly session, because that will probably cause unnecessary pain and suffering. However, please scan through all of them and select one(or two if there are texts that make a pair) and focus on trying to understand that text, using these questions to guide you:
What does the author seem to be saying?
Why does the author think this matters?
How does this relate to other philosophical ideas we have looked at?
How does this relate to other philosophical ideas I am familiar with?
Does this make me think differently about anything?
Be prepared to say something about your chosen text in our small group sessions.
Good luck!
John M sj
In this part of the course, we look at three particularly important thinkers who shape the development of modern philosophy: Descartes, Hume and Kant. We will look, in particular, at the way in which their accounts of the nature of reason shape their treatments of the question of God, and how all this has a bearing on their view of human nature.
We begin with René Descartes, normally thought of as the father of modern philosophy, and focus especially on his book Meditations on First Philosophy. Not only does this book set the trajectory for questions about knowledge and certainty that came to preoccupy subsequent philosophers, it also sets the parameters for debates about the mind and the body which equally characterise modern philosophy. But alongside these topics, which are taught in undergrad philosophy courses across the world, runs another set of concerns: to demonstrate the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. In our sessions we will examine the way in which these latter questions were, for Descartes, inseparable from the former.
David Hume is perhaps the most important and influential philosopher in the English language. In our session, we will look at how his ‘sceptical doubts’ about causation and induction informed his critical treatment of ‘natural religion’, i.e. the attempt to show that God exists on the basis of observations of the natural world. Hume wrote about religion more than any other single topic, and his book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is lively and thought-provoking – much more nuanced and interesting than some of the polemics against belief in God that it has inspired!
Finally we come to Immanuel Kant, who was spurred into philosophical action by Hume’s scepticism, and whose ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy shaped philosophy for the next century and beyond. We will examine the way in which Kant’s ‘critical’ philosophy both limited what could be said about the nature or existence of God (or, indeed, anything outside space and time), and yet, at the same time, claimed to open up a new way of reasoning about the existence of God: a ‘moral argument’ for the existence of God based not on theoretical, but practical, reason.
In each week of the course I will give a presentation, sketching out some of the key ideas from these thinkers. Then we will examine the texts together, to see what sense can be made of them. The outline below is subject to change, depending on how long it takes us to get to grips with the main ideas.
Readings will be available as scanned pdf chapters on the course guide page.
Further supporting readings may be uploaded as the course proceeds.
It will really help if participants have spent some time with the texts that we will be looking at prior to the session. A general pattern to use for working through, and responding to the readings, might look like this:
a. What seems to be the main purpose of this text?
b. What are the most important concepts?
c. What are the key moments in the reflection/argument? Where do the new ideas, or conclusions, or clarifications, come from? How do they arise?
This course begins where the last one left off: with the work of Immanuel Kant. This time we examine Kant’s moral thought more closely, paying attention especially to the role of freedom and will in his account of the nature of moral life. From there we explore how this gave rise to a range of developments and responses: most immediately in the thought of Hegel and Schopenhauer, but in more elliptical ways in the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, both of whom could be said to be crucial influences on later post-modern thought, and in the work of Feuerbach and Marx, whose influence on the 20th century is decisive.
Readings are listed below each topic (they will added every week), which we will explore together in the seminar. The reading in bold is the primary one; others are provided for those who may wish to read further.
To begin the course we examine how Kant described the basis and structure of moral life. For Kant, free, rational, willing is both the principle of all moral action, and the end of all moral action (that which is valuable in and of itself). Whilst Kant’s thought is often summarised with reference to his ‘categorical imperative’, it is surprisingly difficult to get a grip on – in this session we explore a few sections of the Critique of Practical Reason, and Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason.
Many of the philosophical giants 19th century philosophy are responses to Kant’s ‘Copernican’ revolution. In this session we will focus on two: Hegel, whose thought was an important stimulus for Kierkegaard; and Schopenhauer, whose strange and mystical development of the idea of ‘will’ helped to shape the thought of the young Friedrich Nietzsche. We will focus in particular on Schopenhauer’s understanding of the connection between will, renunciation and compassion, as discussed in his essay ‘On the basis of morality’.
1. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (extract)
2. Schopenhauer, On the basis of morals (extract)
3. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (extract)
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most widely-cited authors – and perhaps the most controversial. His thought has been particularly important for Christian theology, and most of the most important European theologians of the 20th century are familiar with, and responsive to, his thought. In this session, we will focus on his understanding of the human person in terms of ‘drives’, and his critique of Judeo-Christian morality.
1. Nietzsche,Daybreak (paras 102, 103, 104, 109 & 119)
2. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (para 1)
We continue our exploration of Nietzsche with consideration of the idea that he himself considered to be his most important: eternal recurrence. It is a perplexing, but oddly compelling idea, and perhaps closer to mysticism than philosophy. But it is also a helpful way of considering how Nietzsche understood ‘nihilism’, and the role of ‘the death of God’ in bringing this about – and what the alternative might look like.
In this final session we give some time to Kierkegaard, who is some ways an uncategorisable thinker: deeply and seriously Christian, but ironic, playful and stubbornly individual. Kierkegaard’s reflections on the nature of ‘the existing individual’ were an important influence on 20th century ‘existentialism’, but perhaps more significant was his influence on Karl Barth, who went on to become the decisive Christian theologian of the 20th century.
Thales to Plato
Aristole and After
Medieval Philosophers
The Birth of Modern Philosophy
The 19th Century
John Moffatt SJ works at the London Jesuit Centre. His first degree was in Classics. He taught in London secondary schools intermittently between 1985 and 2016 and has worked briefly in University Chaplaincy. He has been involved with teenage and adult faith education in Britain and South Africa and has recently completed a doctorate in medieval Islamic philosophy.
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Stuart is the Theology Lead at LJC. He graduated with a degree in Literature and Theology from the University of Hull in 2000. From 2003-9 he studied Philosophical Theology part-time at the University of Nottingham, whilst continuing to work in the third sector with vulnerably-housed or homeless people, and young asylum seekers (as well as pulling pints in a pub). He was Lecturer at York St John University for almost a decade, before moving to London Jesuit Centre in 2021. He now lives in South East London, and spends as much time as he can in the woods.
