History of Philosophy

The philosophical elements in Hebrew thought: monotheism, creation, the soul, divine providence, and moral law as found in the Old Testament tradition.

Chaldean philosophy and science: astronomy, astrology, and their underlying cosmological and theological assumptions.

Egyptian philosophical thought: the doctrine of the soul, immortality, the divine, and the moral order as reflected in Egyptian religion and literature.

Chinese philosophy: Confucianism, Taoism, and other schools; their doctrines on the moral order, Heaven, human nature, and the ideal society.

Hindu philosophical systems: the Vedas and Upanishads, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, the Sankhya and Yoga schools, and their doctrines on reality, the soul, and liberation.

Persian philosophy and religion: Zoroastrianism, the doctrine of Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, cosmic dualism, and the influence of Persian thought on later philosophy.

Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes: the search for a single material principle of all things; the beginning of natural philosophy in Miletus.

Pythagoras and his school: number as the principle of reality, the doctrine of the soul and transmigration, mathematics, and the moral life of the Pythagorean brotherhood.

Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno: the doctrine of the One, the critique of sense knowledge, and Zeno's paradoxes as arguments against multiplicity and motion.

Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras: the doctrine of flux, the four roots, the role of Nous (Mind), and the attempt to reconcile unity and multiplicity.

Leucippus and Democritus: atoms and the void as the ultimate constituents of reality; mechanical materialism and its denial of final causality.

The Sophists — Protagoras and Gorgias — and their relativism and skepticism; the crisis of Greek philosophy that prepared the way for the constructive genius of Socrates.

Socrates: his method of dialectic, moral philosophy, and the minor Socratic schools — the Cynics, Cyrenaics, Megarians, and Eleans.

Plato's philosophy: the theory of Ideas, knowledge and opinion, the soul and its immortality, cosmology, politics, and the later Academy.

Aristotle's comprehensive philosophy: logic, metaphysics, hylomorphism, the four causes, the soul, ethics, politics, and the Peripatetic school after Aristotle.

Stoic philosophy: the sage, virtue as the only good, the logos pervading nature, determinism, and the Stoic influence on Roman thought and Christian ethics.

Epicurus and his school: pleasure and ataraxia as the highest good, atomism revived, the denial of providence, and the Epicurean approach to death and the gods.

Ancient Skepticism from Pyrrho through the New Academy: the suspension of judgment, the criterion of truth, and the influence of skeptical arguments on later philosophy.

Post-Aristotelean eclecticism: the blending of Platonic, Stoic, and other doctrines; Cicero and the Roman reception of Greek philosophy.

Roman Stoics and Epicureans, and Cicero as the great eclectic: the transmission of Greek philosophy to Rome and its adaptation to Roman moral and political concerns.

The fusion of Hebrew scripture with Greek philosophy: Aristobulus, the Letter of Aristeas, the Wisdom of Solomon, and above all Philo Judaeus and his doctrine of the Logos.

The founding of Neoplatonism: Ammonius Saccas and above all Plotinus; the doctrine of the One, the Nous, the World-Soul, and emanation as the structure of reality.

Iamblichus and the Syrian Neoplatonists: the elaboration of the Plotinian hierarchy, the role of theurgy, and the increasingly religious character of later Neoplatonism.

Proclus and the Athenian Neoplatonists: the final systematization of pagan Neoplatonism; its influence on early Christian thought and the closure of the Academy by Justinian.

Gnosticism as a syncretistic religious philosophy: its dualist cosmology, the Demiurge, the divine sparks, and the Gnostic doctrine of salvation through gnosis.

Mani and Manicheism: radical cosmic dualism, the war between light and darkness, and the Manichaean system as a rival to Christianity.

The early Christian Apologists — Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen — and their effort to defend and articulate the faith using the resources of Greek philosophy.

The great orthodox Fathers after the Council of Nicaea: Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and their philosophical contributions.

Augustine's philosophy: illuminationism and the theory of knowledge, the soul, time and eternity, the City of God, evil as privation, and the relation of faith to reason.

The problem of universals — realism, nominalism, and conceptualism — as the central philosophical question of the early medieval period and its theological stakes.

The revival of learning under Charlemagne: Alcuin, Rabanus Maurus, Scotus Eriugena, and the philosophical discussions of the Palace School and the monastic schools.

Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Damian, Roscelin, William of Champeaux, and Abelard: the early debates on universals and the first full statements of realism and nominalism.

The great debate between realism and anti-realism (nominalism/conceptualism) from the 11th to the 13th centuries and its resolution in moderate realism.

Peter Lombard and the Sentence-writers; the mystical tradition of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Victorines; pantheistic currents; and the growing Aristotelian influence.

Avicenna, Averroes, Al-Gazali, Maimonides, and Avicebron: the Arabic and Jewish transmission and interpretation of Aristotle and its decisive influence on Christian Scholasticism.

The factors behind the 13th-century golden age: the recovery of Aristotle, the founding of the universities, the mendicant orders, and the achievement of a synthesis of faith and reason.

Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and Roger Bacon: the summit of medieval philosophy and its enduring achievement.

The factors leading to the decline of Scholasticism after 1300: excessive formalism, the rise of nominalism, the Black Death, and the fracturing of the unity of faith and reason.

William of Ockham and the Nominalist school; the Ockhamist critique of realism and its consequences for theology, science, and the collapse of medieval synthesis.

The survival and revival of Scholasticism in the Renaissance: the Thomist school, the commentators, and the efforts to renew the Scholastic tradition in a changed world.

The Renaissance revival of Platonism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism; the Florentine Academy; Ficino and Pico della Mirandola; the humanist turn away from Scholastic method.

Renaissance naturalism: Telesio, Bruno, Campanella, and the attempt to explain nature without appeal to Aristotelian forms or Christian theology.

Machiavelli, More, and the political thinkers of the Renaissance: the secularization of political theory and the emergence of the modern state concept.

Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke: the empiricist programme, the critique of innate ideas, the tabula rasa, the limits of knowledge, and Locke's political philosophy.

Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz: rationalism, the cogito, substance, monism, the pre-established harmony, and the attempted mathematical reconstruction of philosophy.

Pierre Bayle and the renewal of ancient skeptical arguments as a challenge to both rationalism and revealed religion in the late seventeenth century.

The Second Scholasticism: Suarez, John of St. Thomas, and the continued vitality of the Thomist and Scotist schools during the period of rationalist and empiricist dominance.

Berkeley, Hume, and the French Encyclopédistes: idealism, skepticism about causation and the self, the assault on metaphysics, and the materialist Enlightenment.

Wolff, Leibniz's school, and the German rationalist tradition leading up to Kant; the Enlightenment's confidence in reason and its philosophical presuppositions.

Kant's critical philosophy: the Copernican revolution, the forms of intuition and categories of understanding, the limits of theoretical reason, the moral law, and German Idealism from Fichte through Hegel.

Schopenhauer, Herbart, and positivism (Comte, Mill, Spencer): the diverse reactions against Kantian idealism and the rise of evolutionary and scientific naturalism.

Pragmatism (James, Dewey), Bergsonism, phenomenology (Husserl), and other currents of late 19th and early 20th century philosophy.

The Neo-Scholastic revival: Leo XIII and Aeterni Patris, the Louvain school, Mercier, Maritain, and the renewal of Thomistic philosophy as a living intellectual tradition.