Saturday afternoons 1400-1700

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This 10 seminar course will explore the whole Western philosophical Tradition by looking through the eyes of the great masters of philosophical synthesis, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, and Heidegger, from the Greeks to the Present Day. Philosophy, like Psychotherapy, is an essentially historical undertaking. All our four great philosophers irreversibly shaped and reshaped our sense of the tradition, our sense of the Western mind, and our sense of the foundations of being human and of consciousness. Our approach on this course will be to use the great philosophers to develop our own reflections and explorations and we shall crisscross back and forth, rather more on this course than in the Modern Philosophy course.
 

Introduction (Seminar 1 - October 2)

A mapping of the whole concept of the seminars, as a progressive assimilation of the earlier by the later, repeated four times in terms of the epochs of i. the Greeks, ii. the Mediaeval world, iii. the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and iv. the post-Scientific and nihilistic Modern world.

These four philosophers constantly challenge our senses of the fundamental foundations of our thinking, and all four remain deeply contemporary and of continued direct, or indirect, influence in the present day, - for instance in all the philosophers and psychotherapists addressed in the Modern Philosophy after Nietzsche course. For us psychotherapists they give us a depth dimension and overview, in our awareness of our assumptions and the frameworks in which we seek to make sense of the work we do. And they can be, in a strange way, companions as we seek to discover what we fundamentally believe about our lives and our work.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) (Seminar 2 and 3 - November 20 & December 11) is both the culmination of the Greek flowering and the inaugurator of academic-scientific philosophy and science as we know them. His well-balanced philosophy gives us a way to view the whole Greek pathway before him: the Pre-Socratics, the Sophists, and Socrates and Plato. In modern language he judiciously combines, in a non-dogmatic way, realistic and idealistic elements. He founds the academic approach to philosophy, which leads to Mediaeval and to Modern philosophy and the foundation of the Universities.  More than any other single person, he formulated the concept of an entity, as the locus of existence, which continues to dominate philosophy even today, and may indeed be the default template of all conceptualisation.

Aquinas (1225-1274 CE) (Seminar 4 and 5 - January 15 & February 5) is the supreme synoptic Mediaeval mind. He has come to symbolise the Mediaeval synthesis for modern eyes. He developed a synthesis which reconciled Reason and Revelation. Thus he made a rational philosophical and scientific mode of enquiry available to the later Middle Ages, and the Modern period from the Renaissance onwards.  He integrated Plato and Aristotle. Additionally he integrated the influx from Islamic Philosophy, with the Judaeo-Christian inheritance transmitted via Augustine.  He thus integrates the entire heritage up to that point. He is also a radically systematic thinker who is an original philosopher in his own fight, formulating, for instance, what became the modern concept of intentionality. 

Hegel (1770-1831) (Seminar 6 and 7 - March 5 & April 2), builds on the epoch-making, but somewhat a-historical, achievement of Kant. He offers a synthesis of the whole Western tradition, which sees it as a unified historical whole.  He draws from the influx of Romanticism, and yet operates within the traditions of Western ontology and logic mediated to him through Kant. Hegel raises more radically than anyone before him the implications of the all-pervasive presence of subjectivity and the historical, personal, and social, character of consciousness. He applies this even in realms of discourse which concern objective and scientific knowledge. At the same time, his conception does not override the objective and commonsense dimensions, which are disregarded in some forms of idealism, phenomenalism, and transcendental idealism. Hegel synoptises 2250 years of development, and bequeathes the most influential framework of understanding in the modern world to his successors.         

Heidegger (1889-1976) (Seminar 8 and 9 - May 7 & June 4) is perhaps the most controversial choice of the four, Yet there is no sustained historical vision of the tradition seen from the analytic philosophy tradition, whether logical positivist, or linguistic analytic. Both approaches are deeply a-historical. For a modern philosopher, who has a sense of the history of the whole tradition, we must turn to Heidegger, or Derrida. Derrida, however, in turn leans upon Heidegger's epoch-making reappraisal of the whole tradition. Heidegger introduces his seminal conception of a revised template (a radically participatory template) of what it is to exist as being human. Through this he reopens the question of Being. Some would argue this is the most far-reaching revision of the basic paradigms for over 2000 years. His model also enters a profoundly subtle dialogue with the Hegelian concept of the tradition. Nearly the whole of Heidegger's oeuvre is a deeply attentive dialogue with the tradition before him. Once again, as with Hegel, this is an all pervasively historical mode of thought. It is a mode characteristic of our epoch, and yet the most submerged by the scientific positivism of our day, to which it constitutes a profound challenge.   

Where we are now (Final Seminar - July 2) 

So, in the light of this journey of historical perspective, where next for philosophy? where next for human beings?