November 2023

https://youtu.be/33ixOsdbUEg With William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey was a founder of pragmatism, a uniquely American philosophy. Rejecting the traditional philosophical conception of thought as a function representing…

https://youtu.be/jfowR8sqC9Y René Descartes was known among his seventeenth-century contemporaries chiefly as a mathematician and only secondarily as a natural philosopher—who developed novel theories of physics and of biology—a philosopher of…

https://youtu.be/KqhFfvAFp4k Born on July 15, 1930, in the French Algiers suburb of El-Biar, Jacques Derrida founded the critical method known as “deconstruction,” which has been applied primarily to literary texts…

https://youtu.be/G-3CGl-3eyE His contemporaries—he was born about 460 BC in Abdera, Thrace—called him the “laughing philosopher” because, in ethics and politics, he placed great value on optimism and cheerfulness. Modern historians…

https://youtu.be/sAIa0A40-lY Born on March 6, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, Donald Davidson was educated at Harvard University, primarily in literature and classics, graduating in 1939. He went on to earn a…

https://youtu.be/VlDvXfvNB1s Rabbi Hasdai Crescas, who led the Jewish community in fourteenth- and early fifteenthcentury Aragon, was revered as a great rabbinic authority. He wrote a philosophical polemic refuting Christian principles…

https://youtu.be/UqoXg8P6CWI Rooted in ancient Chinese religious, philosophical, and political traditions, Confucianism emerged as body of philosophical thought through the teachings of Confucius, who saw himself not as an original philosopher,…

https://youtu.be/ZPQaCLtzovk Auguste Comte established positivism, a pervasive philosophical movement from the mid nineteenth century into the early twentieth, when it was dethroned by the advent of logical positivism, or neopositivism.…

https://youtu.be/ZbvtSzsRF9A Although best known as a Roman orator, lawyer, and statesman, renowned as a champion of the Roman republic in opposition to the establishment of an empire, Cicero was a…

https://youtu.be/e6wlKYfvf5g Born in Washington, DC, June 14, 1903, Alonzo Church was a mathematical logician, whoapplied formal logic to mathematics. He was instrumental in creating theoretical computer science, including contributing to…