PHIL 305 From Thales to Richard Rorty
This course is an overview of Western Philosophy in its epistemology, beginning with a correspondence theory of truth where our ideas mirror the external world to the semantic and pragmatic theories of truth where our ideas make different types of sense of the world in order to better serve our current practical interests. The overall narrative of this course is in its seminal figures and issues, from Thales to Richard Rorty. Students will explore the discipline of philosophy from its origins, and consider pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Platonist and Aristotelian Medieval philosophers, Rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz), Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), Kant, Hegel, then the movements of Continental Philosophy and Analytical Philosophy, American pragmatism, and ending with postmodernism. The goal of this course is to help students tell the story of philosophy so as to understand the pressing philosophical problems today.
Credits
3