Topic Index

AristotlePlato's greatest student, whose accounts of virtue, form, and the infinite shaped two thousand years of philosophy and science.Discussed in 13 lectures across 4 courses ↗︎ KantThe Enlightenment philosopher who argued that the mind itself structures experience, setting the limits of what we can know.Discussed in 15 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ DescartesThe founder of modern philosophy, who doubted everything in order to place knowledge and the new science on a certain footing.Discussed in 12 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ SocratesThe founder of Western ethics, who demanded definitions of the good rather than examples, and died for the way he asked.Discussed in 13 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ HumeThe Scottish empiricist whose skepticism about causation and induction posed the challenge later philosophy had to answer.Discussed in 8 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ formThe Socratic search for what all good things share, which Plato turned into a metaphysics and Kant relocated inside the mind.Discussed in 7 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ scientific revolutionThe upheaval in which one settled picture of the universe gave way, and philosophy had to make sense of the new science.Discussed in 7 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ John von NeumannThe polymath who designed the architecture nearly every computer still uses, and helped found game theory and quantum mathematics.Discussed in 10 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ causalityThe connection between cause and effect: necessary structure of the world, contingent habit of the mind, or something the mind supplies.Discussed in 6 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ The ApologyPlato's account of Socrates' trial and death sentence, the founding scene of philosophy as a way of life.Discussed in 6 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ a prioriKnowledge independent of the senses, like logic and mathematics, and the test case for what the mind can know without experience.Discussed in 8 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ GalileoA founder of the scientific revolution whose experiments and paradoxes unsettled both physics and the mathematics of the infinite.Discussed in 8 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ metaphysicsThe study of what exists and what reality is like at the most general level, beyond what any experiment can settle.Discussed in 5 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ rationalismThe view that reason alone can deliver substantial knowledge of the world.Discussed in 5 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ CantorThe mathematician who tamed the infinite, proving that some infinities are larger than others.Discussed in 7 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ contingentWhat could have been otherwise, in contrast with what is necessary.Discussed in 6 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ essenceWhat a thing is, as opposed to the fact that it is; the distinction existentialism later reversed.Discussed in 6 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ halting problemThe proof that some questions about programs can never be answered by any computer, today or in any future.Discussed in 6 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ PlatoThe author of the Socratic dialogues and the demand that every claim be backed by reasons.Discussed in 6 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ empiricismThe view that all knowledge ultimately comes from the senses.Discussed in 4 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ quantum mechanicsThe most successful physical theory ever tested, and the crisis it creates for any straightforward picture of reality.Discussed in 4 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ reasonDiscussed in 4 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ MillThe utilitarian who measured right action by the happiness it produces.Discussed in 10 lectures ↗︎ GödelThe logician whose incompleteness theorems proved that mathematics can never fully certify itself.Discussed in 5 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎