Over my next seven blog posts I am going to be giving you ‘A Crash Course in Western Philosophy’. In this course you will get a rapid, but fascinating tour through the twists and turns of thought that have lead to the development of the Western mind.
And that means your mind – at least if you are part of Western Culture. You see the story of philosophy is the story of the development of your mind. As you understand the struggles and triumphs that have occurred in the unending quest to understand, you will see your mind and its patterns of thought differently.
You will begin to see that things you struggle to comprehend, and some of your most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality were actually created through the history of philosophy.
You inherited a great deal of how and what you think.
Let me give you an example.
Do you ever struggle with knowing what the right thing to do is, and actually do it?
You probably don’t realize that this challenge comes from two different ways that ideas of truth were introduced into Western Philosophy. When you see how the idea of truth was developed through the ages it will make sense why we struggle to do the right thing even when we know what it is.
This is just one of many examples of the kind of everyday philosophical struggles that we all encounter can be better understood if we have a better understanding of how we came to think the way we do about everything.
So look forward to my upcoming posts and join me for a journey into the deeper history of your own mind.
The lesson’s I have planned for us are:
- Plato and Aristotle: The Dreamer and the Scientist
- The Two Truths of the Middle Ages
- The Heroic Leap From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment
- The Battle of Mind and Matter
- Science, Scientism and the Fate of Spirituality in the Western World
- The Triumph of Romanticism
- The 20th Century: Existentialism and Pragmatism
I look forward to sharing all of this with you.
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