Western Thought

Many moons back, I purchased a course from The Teaching Company called, “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition”. At 42 hours, most of it pretty dry stuff unless you’re an übernerd, it kept me occupied for a bit. I disagreed with many points raised by the presenters, so perhaps this would be a fitting forum in which to air those disagreements.

The course used a generally historical and sequential approach to trace the development of Western thought and philosophy. The Pre-Socratics were the basis upon which the thought of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were based. The Stoics, Epicureans and others expanded upon those, while the Romans inherited and expanded upon what the Greeks had done. The Old and New Testaments, together with the Greeks and Romans, were the foundation upon which the Medieval thinkers built. And so forth and so on, up to the present day. I was a bit disappointed that some of those who I consider to be of monumental importance received only a 30-minute treatment, but I suppose one cannot expect the breadth and depth of several college courses to be crammed into a finite time.

Anything that I have to say about these people must also necessarily be crammed into a finite space. I would highly recommend checking each of these folks at Wikipedia for their biographical info and following that up with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/) for a much more in-depth (and more qualified) analysis of their work and impact.