PHILOSOPHY

Classical Western: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern : Epistemology and Metaphysics

Pre-Socratic Philosophers: Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximenies, Ionians, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Democritus,
The Sophists and Socrates
Plato and Aristotle:
 Plato – Theory of knowledge, knowledge and opinion, theory of Ideas, the method of dialectic, soul and God.
 Aristotle – Classification of the sciences, the theoretical, the practical and the
productive, logic as an organon, critique of Plato’s theory of Ideas, theory of causation, form and matter, potentiality and actuality, soul and God.

Medieval Philosophy:

 Augustine: Problem of Evil.
 Anselm: Ontological argument.
 Thomas Aquinas: Faith and Reason, Essence and Existence, the Existence of God.
Modern Western Philosophy:
 Descartes : Conception of method , Criteria of truth, doubt and methodological
scepticism, cogito ergo sum, innate ideas, Cartesian dualism: mind and matter, proofs for the existence of God, interactionism.
 Spinoza : Substance, Attribute and Mode, the concept of ‘God or Nature’, Intellectual love of God, parallelism, pantheism, three orders of knowing.
 Leibnitz : Monadology, truths of reason and fact, innateness of ideas, proofs for the existence of God, principles of non – contradiction, sufficient reason and identity of indiscernibles, the doctrine of pre -established harmony, problem of freedom.
 Locke : Ideas and their classification, refutation of innate ideas, theory of substance,
distinction between primary and secondary qualities, theory of knowledge, three grades of knowledge.
 Berkeley : Rejection of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities,
immaterialism, critique of abstract ideas, esse est percipi, the problem of solipcism; God and self.
 Hume : Impressions and ideas, knowledge concerning relations of ideas and knowledge concerning matters of fact, induction and causality, the external world and the self, personal identity, rejection of metaphysics, scepticism, reason and the passions.
 Kant : The critical philosophy, classification of judgements, possibility of synthetic a priori judgements, the Copernican revolution, forms of sensibility, categories of understanding, the metaphysical and the transcendental deduction of the categories, phenomenon and noumenon, the Ideas of Reason – soul, God and world as a whole, rejection of speculative metaphysics.
 Hegel : The conception of Geist (spirit), the dialectical method, concepts of being, non – being and becoming, absolute idealism, Freedom.