File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-11-03.013, message 91


Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 12:04:54 -0400
From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com>
Subject: Home or Auto Didact


   The Economist, 19 October 1996, p. 91.

   _________________________________________________________

   The Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition

   (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Moses, Jesus, Marcus
   Aurelius, Augustine, Aquinas, More, Machiavelli, Bacon,
   Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Newton, Locke, Berkeley,
   Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Burke, Montesquieu, Hegel,
   Marx, Mill, Kierkegaard, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, James,
   Ayers, Quine, Wittgenstein, Weber, Habermas, Kuhn, Rorty,
   Foucault, Rawls, Levi-Strauss. etc.)

   ...taught by 6 widely acclaimed lecture professors on
   audio and video cassettes
   _________________________________________________________

   [Photo] Darren Staloff, Ph.D., City College of New York

   [Photo] Michael Sugrue, Ph.D., Princeton University

   [Photo] Dennis Dalton, Ph.D. Barnard College/Columbia
   University

   [Photo] Alan Charles Kors, Ph. D., University of
   Pennsylvania

               The Superstar Faculty Also Includes:
           Robert Oden, Ph.D., President, Kenyon College
         Elizabeth McNamer, Ph.D., Rocky Mountain College

   _________________________________________________________

   WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF LIFE? What is the best *kind* of
   life? Who or what is God? What is the essence of justice?
   When is it legitimate for one person to have power over
   others? Can any of these questions be answered?

   These are basic riddles of human experience that
   thoughtful men and women have pondered since the dawn of
   civilization.

   You too must have asked yourself questions like these
   many times. And perhaps you once vowed that some day you
   would plow through *all* the great thinkers of the
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   But you know you never will. Frankly, it would require a
   minimum of several years of withdrawal from active life,
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   Now, at last, here is a feasible way to enjoy the
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   Darren Staloff and Michael Sugrue, who for several years
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   With these video or audio recordings of six of America's
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   Just listening to these lectures -- whether you decide to
   supplement them by browsing through the texts of the
   works discussed or not -- will give you a grasp of the
   intellectual history of the Western world possessed by as
   few as one out of every thousand Americans.

   _________________________________________________________

                       The Curriculum
   _________________________________________________________

   PART I: Ancient Philosophy and Faith: From Athens to
   Jerusalem

   Introduction to the Problems & Scope of Philosophy; The
   Old Testament; The Gospels of Mark & Matthew; Paul: His
   World; Presocratics: Ionian Speculation & Eliatic
   Metaphysics; Republic I: Justice, Power & Knowledge;
   Republic II-V: Soul & City; Republic VI-X: The
   Architecture of Reality; Aristotle's Metaphysical Views;
   Aristotle's Politics: The Golden Mean & Just Rule; Marcus
   Aurelius' *Meditations. The Stoic Ideal; Augustine's
   *City of God*: Grace, Original Sin & Theodicy

   Course No. 401. Video or Audio
   _________________________________________________________

   PART II: The Age of Faith to The Age of Reason

   Aquinas' *Summa Theologica*: The Thomist Synthesis & Its
   Political & Social Content; More's *Utopia*: Reason &
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   Realism, Political Science & the Renaissance; Bacon's
   *New Organon*: The Call for a New Science; Descartes'
   Epistemology & the Mind-Body Problem; Hobbes' *Leviathan:
   Of Man*; Hobbes' *Leviathan: Of the Common-wealth*;
   Spinoza's Ethics: Metaphysics & the Path to Salvation;
   The Newtonian Revolution; The Early Enlightenment & the
   Search for the Laws of History: Vico's *New Science of
   History*; Pascal's *Pensees*; The Philosophy of G.W.
   Liebniz

   Course No. 402. Video or Audio
   _________________________________________________________

   PART III: The Enlightenment and Its Critics

   Locke's Theory of Knowledge; Locke's Political Theory;
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   Berkeley's Idealism & the Critique of Materialism; Hume's
   Epistemology; Hume's Theory of Morality; Smith's *Wealth
   of Nations*; Rousseau's Dissent: The Challenge to the
   Idea of Progress; Kant's "Copernican Revolution":
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   Philosophy; Burke & the Birth of Enlightened
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   the Enlightenment

   Course No. 403. Video or Audio
   _________________________________________________________

   PART IV: Philosophy in the Epoch of Ideology

   Comte & the Origins of Sociology; Hegel: The
   Phenomenology of Geist; Hegel's Philosophy of History;
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   Historical Materialism; Kierkegaard's Christian
   Existentialism; Schopenhauer: The World as Will & Idea;
   The Classical Doctrine of Liberal Democracy: John Stuart
   Mill's *On Liberty & Utilitarianism*; The Darwinian
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   Course No. 404. Video or Audio
   _________________________________________________________

   PART V: Modernism and the Age of Analysis: Beginnings

   Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity: The Genealogy of
   Morals; Nietzsche's Perspectivalism & Critique of
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   Course No. 405. Video or Audio
   _________________________________________________________

   PART VI: Modernism and the Age of Analysis: Conclusions

   Kuhn's Paradigm Paradigm; Habermas' Critical Theory;
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   Post-Structuralism; Quines Ontological Relativism & the
   End of"Philosophy"; Rorty's Neo-Pragmatism; Jean-Francois
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   Course No. 406. Video or Audio
   _________________________________________________________

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   [Torch of learning image]
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   Please send me the following Parts from Great Minds, each
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   _________________________________________________________
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   _________________________________________________________
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   _________________________________________________________
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