[Lecture One] Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present
by Dr. Leonard Peikoff
Total Time: 2 hours, 35 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: In this lecture, Dr. Peikoff provides an overview of the development of Western philosophy prior to the eighteenth century. He reviews the ideas of four major philosophers—Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, and David Hume—and how they each provided unique answers to some of the major questions in philosophy, specifically what is the nature of reality and how do we gain knowledge.
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.
| Describe the role of change in Heraclitus’s philosophy. |
| What is the logical result of accepting Heraclitus’s concept of flux? |
| How did Plato respond to the Heraclitean flux when describing reality? |
| What argument does Plato provide to justify his view of universals? |
| Given his metaphysical Idealism, how does Plato explain how we attain knowledge? |
| What is Aristotle’s answer to the problem of change? |
| Explain Aristotle’s answer to Plato’s argument regarding universals. |
| How does Aristotle account for the acquisition of knowledge? |
| Describe the basic difference between the modern Rationalists and Empiricists. |
| Why did Nominalism collapse into Sensualism and Skepticism in David Hume’s philosophy? |
| What was the state of philosophy after David Hume? |
Q&A Guide
Below is a list of questions from the audience taken from this lecture, along with (approximate) time stamps.
| 2:13:07 | Do you think Hume can be viewed as a rationalist who was led to skepticism by what he thought was a lack of evidence, rather than the traditional view which pegs him as an empiricist? |
| 2:13:53 | Isn’t Hume’s philosophy an abstraction? If so, how does he deal with that fact? |
| 2:16:26 | Does the denial of cause and effect imply some form of innate ideas? |
| 2:18:36 | Can you say that the seeds of modern linguistic analysis are found in Hume? |
| 2:21:08 | What is wrong with Aristotle’s view that universals exist in the particulars? |
| 2:22:47 | What’s the relationship between the problem of universals and the problem of induction? |
| 2:25:05 | Is the nominalist doctrine of “rough similarities” a stolen concept? |
| 2:28:10 | Is philosophy a road that leads to the experience of satori? |
| 2:30:07 | Is your statement that a philosophy is a way of life definitional? |
| 2:32:01 | In the last course [Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume], it was basically a fight between the skeptics and the Platonists. Will we see this fight continuing and, if so, who’s on what side? |
| 2:33:35 | Does Hume’s idea that your sense perception is there and there is no “you” relate to Plato’s world of forms? |