[Lecture Six] Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 49 minutes
Course summary: Presented as two complementary twelve-lecture courses—Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume and Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present—The History of Philosophy covers the whole of western philosophy from its discovery in Ancient Greece to the twentieth century, including Objectivism. Dr. Peikoff argues that philosophy is the means by which we can understand any human culture and, more broadly, the history and changing course of a civilization. Read more »
In this lecture: Philosophy in the centuries following Aristotle became less systematic and original. Facing the changes in the Hellenistic period that witnessed the decline of the city-state and the rise of the Roman Empire, philosophers sought to answer how an individual could live in an uncertain world. This lecture examines the main schools of philosophy in this period: Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Neo-Platonism. Each school focused increasingly on the helplessness and incapacity of humanity and turned toward asceticism and otherworldly explanations of meaning and truth.
Study Guide
This material is designed to help you digest the lecture content. You can also download below a PDF study guide for the entire course.
| What conditions in the world led to changes in how philosophers approached their task? |
| How does Epicurus overcome his deterministic metaphysical views in ethics? |
| What in human nature lays the foundation of Epicurean ethics? |
| For Epicurus, what is the paradoxical relationship between desire and pleasure? |
| How did the Stoic philosophers view the role of a god or gods in human life? |
| Describe the consequence of separating values from virtues in the Stoics ethics. |
| How did the Stoics view of politics make a lasting contribution to Western civilization? |
| What are the limits of knowing according to Skeptics? |
| Identify some legacies of skepticism in modern thought and culture. |
| How did Plotinus translate Platonic forms into a religious context? |
| Explain how Plotinus resolved the question of evil. |
| How does the metaphysics of the One necessitate Plotinus’s ethical approach? |
| What role did the mystery religions of the ancient world play in philosophic change? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:11:44 | Please comment on the view that, although certainty is impossible, probability is. |
| 2:13:50 | If evil is non-Godness, doesn’t this still imply non-omnipotence on the part of God? |
| 2:16:04 | What is the Objectivist explanation of “the liar paradox”? |
| 2:17:52 | Have there been any psychological hedonists who are not ethical hedonists? |
| 2:18:47 | What is the current method used by determinists to grapple with the problem of freedom and morality? |
| 2:22:38 | How do you reconcile free will with causality? |
| 2:25:13 | Does Plotinus’s theory of the world soul bear any relation to Hegel’s theory of the world spirit? |
| 2:26:22 | What about the argument of the skeptics to show that the syllogism is invalid? What is the answer to it? |
| 2:29:51 | Did Aristotle have any significant effect at all on the several centuries immediately following his death? |
| 2:30:19 | Who was the father of individual rights? |
| 2:31:14 | Why didn’t Aristotle catch on in the way that the Stoics, skeptics, and others did? |
| 2:33:58 | Please discuss the issue of life versus happiness versus pleasure as the standard of value in an ethics? |
| 2:39:53 | Could you comment on the mathematical logic of Russell and Whitehead? |
| 2:41:49 | Will this lecture series ever be published in some form? |
| 2:42:20 | Discuss the Stoic answers to the problem of evil. |
| 2:46:55 | Why is mind potentiality in man and yet the perfect self-consciousness of the unmoved mover is pure actuality? Isn’t this inconsistent? |