Big Questions, to be sure

A History of Philosophy from Socrates to Sartre

by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)

(Links to chapters at left)

Introduction
Distinguishing Science, Philosophy and Religion

Knowledge and Reality

I.       How do we Know that 2+3=5?:  Plato’s Theories of Recollection and Reality

II.      What Is the Meaning of Being?: Aristotle’s Response to Plato

III.     Descartes’s Meditations I and II: Can we Really Know Anything, or is Everything Doubtful?

IV.     Is Matter All that Is? The Materialism of Hobbes

V.      The Evil of Inequality: Rousseau Responds to Hobbes

VI.     Does Physical Matter Exist?: Berkeley’s “Immaterialism”

VII.   The Empiricism of David Hume: The End of Metaphysics?

VIII.  Kant’s Response to Hume: a Transcendental Philosophy

IX.     Heidegger: Retrieving the Meaning of Philosophy

Human Nature and Freedom

X.       Freud: Psyche and Civilization

XI.      Erich Fromm Responds to Freud: The Art of Loving

XII.     The Meaning of Freedom: Augustine’s “Two Wills”

XIII.    A Philosophy of Freedom: Sartre’s “Atheistic Existentialism”

XIV.    Wisdom By Example: The Life and Death of Socrates

On Ethics 

Introduction: The Issues of Ethics and Confronting Ethical Relativism

XV.      Mill: The Utility of Utilitarianism 

XVI.    Kant: Morality as Motivation, and Human Autonomy as Highest Good

The Existence of God

XVII.   Can We Prove that God Exists?: Anselm’s Proslogion

XVIII.  Finding God in the World: Thomas Aquinas
XIX.     Descartes Meditations III-VI: the Proof of the Existence of God and of Corporeal Things

Epilogue
The Theory of Evolution: Do Science and Religion Really Have Anything to Fight Over?