If your learner is curious to know just a little, or eager to begin studying “real” college-level philosophy, this class is for them.  There is something here for every student, no matter if this is their very first class in philosophy, or if they are already reading the great philosophers to get ready for college.  This will be a fun on-going class to continue their journey of discovery.  Join anytime - skip any weekly topic that is not of interest.  

Class enrollments are kept low so I can adapt my teaching to the learning level of each student, and personalize the course content just for them.  

Overview :

In ancient Greece, philosophy was called “the first science.”  It meant philosophy was the most important area of knowledge for one to study, and everything else was merely a specialized subtopic under its controlling authority.  

The same is true today.  

Philosophy is not a marginal topic, set aside for specialists in the humanities.  Modern philosophy has become inextricable to our understanding of history, politics, sociology, economics, and even natural science; it has helped shaped the emergent fields of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, legal personhood, and more.  We now live in a post-truth world: this is the postmodern.  And philosophy now claims, once again, to be the first science of this brave new postmodern world.   

I introduce students to the central questions plaguing modern and postmodern philosophy, the foremost of which is creating a philosophy without metaphysics.  This would be a philosophy fully within the realm of critical inquiry, with no basis in God, theology, or anything outside our investigation.  But this raised two key problems.  The first was the sense of one’s self at the heart of consciousness.  Ancient and medieval philosophies had postulated the metaphysical “soul” as the source of consciousness, a theological claim.  Also problematic was describing the empirical world as having an existence apart from our perception of it (the “thing-in-itself” problem).  Beginning with Kant and continuing to the present day, philosophers have struggled to describe self-consciousness and the empirical world without metaphysics or theology.  Does existence precede essence?  Are we embodied beings whose identities come subsequent to language, culture, and experience?  Is reality only a 'social construction' or even just a simulation?  The solutions to these problems include epistemological approaches (a priori and a posteriori), phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism, each being articulated in differing ways by Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Camus, and Derrida.  Additional details on the topics to be discussed is included in the Course Schedule (see below).

Class Presentation
This will be an interactive seminar and lecture with slides for students to keep, with ample opportunity for student questions – just like in university.  The presentation will be toward student interests, students are encouraged to come up with questions for me to tailor the class to those interests.  Each week is a new topic.  Students can enroll at any time - or skip any weekly topic that does not fit with their interests.  


Course Schedule 


Topic 1: Descartes 

Discussion of Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)


Topic 2:  Hobbes and Hume

Discussion of The Leviathan (1651) and A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)


Topic 3: Kant 

Discussion of Critique of Pure Reason (1787)


Topic 4: Fichte and Hegel 

Discussion of The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)


Topic 5: Schopenhauer

Discussion of The World as Will and Representation (1859)


Topic 6: Nietzsche 

Discussion of The Joyous Science (1882)


Topic 7: Husserl 

Discussion of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1913)


Topic 8: Heidegger 

Discussion of Being and Time (1927)


Topic 9: Schweitzer 

Discussion of The Philosophy of Civilization (1923)


Topic 10: Sartre 

Discussion of Nausea (1935)


Topic 11: Camus

Discussion of The Rebel (1951)


Topic 12: Derrida 

Discussion of The Animal That Therefore I Am (2002)

Topic 13: Simone Weil

Topic 14: Simone de Beauvoir

Topic 15: Edith Stein

Topic 16: Hannah Arendt

Topic 17: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy 

Topic 18: Ancient Greeks on Justice

Topic 19: Ancient Greeks on Education

Topic 20: The Stoics of Greece and Rome

Topic 21: Plotinus and Proclus

Topic 22: Medieval Philosophy with Clement of Alexandria, Gregory Palamas, Anselm of Canterbury, Maimonides, and Avicenna

Topic 23: Kierkegaard

Topic 24: Asian philosophy with Lao-tzu, Sun-tzu, Confucius, and Shinto

Topic 25: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Naturphilosophie

Topic 26: Environmental Philosophy with Thoreau and Aldo Leopold

Topic 27: Structuralism with Lacan

Topic 28: Post-structuralism with Deleuze 

Topic 29: Hermeneutics with Gadamer 

Topics will then cycle back to week 1, and repeat in the same order (students may request special topics or to work the listing in different order, if they wish!)  


Each of the four sections of this class are on a different philosopher.  Please inquire on which section is on which topic.