Dr Tom Kerns
North Seattle Community College

 

Mini-lectures
on various topics

Introductory materials

• Your teachers this quarter

Lectures related to the Plato readings

• Plato's Cave, and degrees of separation from the real
• Who is Socrates?
• A few important dates in ancient Greece
• Socratic method
• Socrates as midwife
• Indirect communication a la Soren Kierkegaard
• Dad and George: a story of indirect communication
• Person A injures person B
• Athenian history: the rest of the story
• Eros in The Phaedrus
• A few books about erotic love
• Plato's three parts of the soul
• The Phaedrus and The Eternal

Lectures related to the Hebrew readings

• The Greek and Hebrew world views compared
• Hebrew wisdom literature: An introduction
• The wisdom teachings of The Book of Proverbs
• Stages on life's way
• Introduction to The Book of Job
• What God likes about Job

Lectures related to epistemology

• Historical periods in western philosophy
• A few significant dates in the modern period
• Introduction to epistemology
• On Stuff
• Quantum physics
• My Dream
• Tulpas and Hinduism
• The empiricist and rationalist philosophers
• Introduction to John Locke
• Introduction to George Berkeley
• Introduction to David Hume
• Introduction to Immanuel Kant
• A too-short outline of Immanuel Kant's epistemology

Lectures related to Arthur Schopenhauer

• A Philosophical map
• Introduction to Schopenhauer
• Buddhism and Schopenhauer
• Life is suffering because life is willing
• The world as representation
• The world as Will
• Aesthetic contemplation
• Askesis
• No will = no world
• Assessments

Lectures related to Emanuel Swedenborg

• Introduction to Emmanuel Swedenborg
• The Ruling Love and Correspondences

Lectures related to Martin Buber

• Introduction to Martin Buber
• Buber's dream

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