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This current series of 60 lectures is actually the second edition of the original Great Ideas in Philosophy prepared nearly a decade ago. Now, philosophy being the subject it is, I would not say that comparably great ideas have come along in the recent decade, but there are good reasons for a second edition, in any case.
Well, that much said, let me cut out, now, the prefatory remarks at this point, and get to the course of lectures themselves.
When Sir Arthur Evans excavated the great court at Knossos on the island of Crete, the court of King Minos, he discovered extraordinary mural paintings featuring young athletes, brave Greek boys, hurtling over large bulls in tasks at once ritualistic and dangerous. Now, in his war with Athens, King Minos of Crete exacted as annual tribute seven young boys and seven girls as sacrifices to the Minotaur. Theseus was to be one of these sacrificial victims.
If Theseus was to find and kill the Minotaur, thereby liberating Athens from this macabre burden, he would have to negotiate a complex maze, the labyrinth, so cleverly fashioned by Daedalus. So vexing was the task that no one who ever entered this maze was able to find his way out. However, Ariadne, the princess daughter of King Minos, fell in love with Theseus and gave him a ball of string, a golden cord, which he could use to find his way back out of the labyrinth that had led him initially to the Minotaur. Now, once within the labyrinth, Theseus confronts and kills the Minotaur, thus becoming a fabled hero to the Athenians.
Of course, all mythology is laden with metaphor. Surely, the cord provided by Ariadne is something of the metaphor of history itself. You find your way out of a bind, you find your way out of great perplexity, by retracing the steps that led to the difficulties in the first place.
Now, we are about to embark on a journey into an intellectual labyrinth of 60 lectures devoted to great ideas in philosophy, covering a period of time from remote antiquity to the present century, and I am going to need something of Ariadne's cord to do this. The guide here really will have to be the history of ideas, the great ideas in philosophy, a history that is not cumulative in the sense that scientific knowledge is cumulative.
Rather, intellectual history presents us with a set of ideas that, building on precedents, on past mistakes, past understandings, lead us, perhaps, toward the light of progress.
Well, science develops in the sense of ever more general laws and ever more reliable data, but the developments in philosophy are chiefly in the form of greater clarity, an ever more refined sense of just what makes the problem problematic. If ignorance is not thereby totally overcome, at least it is exposed.
Now, to some extent, philosophy does not begin with a settled position on political and moral matters, then seeking ways to enshrine the settled view. Rather, the mission is a broadly epistemological one. The search, as we shall discover, is the search for truth, or at least for such illumination as to allow us to see the biases and half-truths that have led from one blind alley to another in the labyrinth of thought.
I would say there are three overarching questions that consume much, if not all, of the subject matter of philosophy; three central problem areas.
There is first the problem of knowledge, then, the problem of conduct, and finally, the problem of governance in the political sense. How are we to understand these problems? Why are they set down in this order?
Well, these are the essential questions. What is it I am able to know? How should I live my life? What are the political realities and options facing me? Is this the sort of polis, is this the sort of community, is this the sort of tribe capable of sustaining, nurturing, and otherwise furthering what human beings take to be their best interests—those best interests often specified in the form of myth and tradition?
Now, long before the appearance of philosophy as such, issues of this sort were engaged, often heroically, by persons and by entire communities, as they are to this minute. Indeed, philosophy comes about at a very late stage in the development of this engagement, in the development of this daily encounter with the problem of knowledge, the problem of conduct, and the problem of governance.
Philosophy has this perpetual characteristic, and we shall explore it, chapter and verse, as best we can.
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