http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/1754720/3099042/
Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th
Centuries
spookytruckerdude
Audio Books : Misc. Educational : MP3/Variable : English
Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and
18th Centuries
Course No. 447 (24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
Taught by Alan Charles Kors
University of Pennsylvania
Ph.D., Harvard University
The DVD version of this course is illustrated with portraits of the
major
figures discussed, and with on-screen quotes covering many key
points. The
audio version succeeds admirably as well. You can order either
format in
full confidence.
Modern science, representative democracy, and a wave of wars were
caused by
a revolution of the intellect that seized Europe between 1600 and
1800.
Ideas and the Transformation of Human Life
Shaking the minds of the continent like few things before or since,
this
revolution challenged previous ways of understanding reality and
sparked
what Professor Alan Charles Kors calls "perhaps the most profound
transformation of European, if not human, life."
Revolutions in thought (as opposed to those in politics or science)
are in
many ways the most far-reaching. They affect our entire sense of
legitimate
authority, of the possible and impossible, of right and wrong, and
of the
potentials of human life.
The goal of these lectures is to understand the conceptual and
cultural
revolution of the Enlightenment. In them, you see the birth of
modern
thought in the dilemmas, debates, and extraordinary works of the
17th- and
18th-century mind.
Professor Kors is Professor of History at the University of
Pennsylvania,
where he has taught for over 30 years. His courses on European
intellectual
history have won two awards for distinguished teaching.
He is the editor-in-chief of the multi-volume Oxford University
Press
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment and has written and edited
several books
on European intellectual history.
The Power of Aristotle and the Churchmen
When the 17th century dawned in Europe, past authors who had stood
the test
of time dominated the world of learning and understanding.
Their system of thought-Aristotelian scholasticism-emerged from the
fusion
of those authorities and Christian doctrine. Professor Kors shows
how fully
these ideas had suffused and controlled thought and society.
The Walls begin to Crumble
A series of fundamental assaults upon the inherited intellectual
system
dominated the intellectual life of the 17th century.
Those assaults constituted nothing less than a conceptual
revolution that
altered the European relationship to thought, nature, and human
possibility.
With Professor Kors, you examine the key thinkers who changed the
world.
Francis Bacon, politician and philosopher, criticized the entire
Western
intellectual inheritance, revising the human quest for knowledge
and
transforming the uses of knowledge into power over the forces of
nature.
René Descartes created a coherent philosophical system that became
the major
challenge to scholasticism on the Continent. Descartes sought to
demonstrate
that humans can establish a criterion of truth and, with it, know
with
certainty the real nature of things.
Thomas Hobbes, author of the monumental work of political
philosophy known
as Leviathan (1651), argued that the entire world was matter in
motion
according to mechanical laws. Thus, there was no freedom of the
will, and
all things were the necessary results of prior causes.
Blaise Pascal was one of the 17th century's most influential
fideists.
Philosophical skepticism is the belief that we may know nothing
with
certainty. When used to humble human reason and demonstrate our
dependence
on religious faith, it is termed "fideism"-yet another systematic
assault on
Aristotelian scholasticism.
Physics, Politics, and the End of the Old Order
The new knowledge had gained a foothold, but then you see how
Newton made it
dominant. The 1687 publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica
was not
merely a major event in the history of Western science but a
watershed in
the history of Western culture.
Newton's Principia convinced the majority of its readers that the
world was
ordered and coherent and that the human mind, using Baconian
inductive
methodology and mathematical reasoning, could grasp that order.
John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) changed
the way in
which the culture thought about the whole phenomenon of human
knowledge.
To Locke, the mind begins as a blank slate on which experience
imprints
ideas via the senses and via reflection. Because experience is not
logically
determined, our knowledge of the world is merely probable. The
Baron de
Montesquieu expanded Locke's idea in the areas of law, society, and
politics.
The Dam Bursts
The 18th century sought to take the models of Newton and Locke and
apply
them to the fullest possible range of human inquiry and endeavor.
The heirs of that conceptual revolution-the "new philosophers"-both
popularized what they took to be the substance and implications of
what had
occurred in the 17th century and extended them to new areas of
inquiry. You
study the work of David Hume, Voltaire, the "philosophes," and the
encyclopedist Denis Diderot.
They dealt with the dramatic implications of the new philosophy for
religious issues: miracle, revelation, supernaturalism, the
authority of the
priesthood, human nature, sin, and virtue.
They sought to understand both society and religion in increasingly
natural
terms, to establish the rights of freedom of inquiry and belief,
and to
discredit, reform, or replace those authorities that could not
justify
themselves by the new criteria and proper uses of knowledge.
By the end of the 18th century, the prestige of ancient thought and
of the
inherited system was a thing of the past.
The new ideas were not accepted without dissent. Rousseau, writing
in the
middle of the 18th century, framed a profoundly influential
critique, which
echoes down to our own day. He argued that cultural "progress"
inevitably
leads to moral decadence via the proliferation of artificial needs
and
inequalities. But his protest did not stop the march of progress.
Educated Europeans believed that they had a new understanding-of
thought and
the human mind, of method, of nature, and of the uses of
knowledge-with
which they could come to know the world correctly for the first
time in
human history and with which they could rewrite the possibilities
of human
life.
Soon, under the weight of these new ideas, all over the globe,
monarchs
fell.
This course puts us at the heart of the most far-reaching and
consequential
intellectual changes in the history of European civilization.
Course Lecture Titles
1. Introduction-Intellectual History and Conceptual Change
2. The Dawn of the 17th Century-Aristotelian Scholasticism
3. The New Vision of Francis Bacon
4. The New Astronomy and Cosmology
5. Descartes's Dream of Perfect Knowledge
6. The Specter of Thomas Hobbes
7. Skepticism and Jansenism-Blaise Pascal
8. Newton's Discovery
9. The Newtonian Revolution
10. John Locke-The Revolution in Knowledge
11. The Lockean Moment
12. Skepticism and Calvinism-Pierre Bayle
13. The Moderns-The Generation of 1680-1715
14. Introduction to Deism
15. The Conflict Between Deism and Christianity
16. Montesquieu and the Problem of Relativism
17. Voltaire-Bringing England To France
18. Bishop Joseph Butler and God's Providence
19. The Skeptical Challenge to Optimism-David Hume
20. The Assault upon Philosophical Optimism-Voltaire
21. The Philosophes-The Triumph of the French Enlightenment
22. Beccaria and Enlightened Reform
23. Rousseau's Dissent
24. Materialism & Naturalism-The Boundaries of the Enlightenment
Size: 226.82 MB
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