Includes bibliographical references (p. 232-233) and index.
Comes from a tradition that produced some of the twentieth century's most impressive media personalities: that of the scholarship-educated, Oxbridge-refined, intellectually omnivorous, occasionally office-holding, radio- and television-savvy man of letters. Students and professors of philosophy probably know him from his large print oeuvre, which includes volumes on Popper and Schopenhauer as well as several guides to western philosophy and the autobiographical. He also wrote another memoir called The Television Interviewer, and philosophically inclined laymen may fondly remember him as just that. When Magee played to both these strengths at once, he came up with two philosophical television shows in the span of a decade: Men of Ideas, which began in 1978, and The Great Philosophers, which ran in 1987. Both series brought BBC viewers in-depth, uncut conversations with many of the day's most famous philosophers.
You can watch select interviews of Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers on YouTube, including:. At the top of the post, you'll find Magee talking with, a well-known specialist in 'logical positivism,' about the development of, and challenges to, that philosophical sub-field.
Two philosophers, relaxed on a couch, sometimes smoking, enthusiastically engaged in a commercial-free back-and-forth about the most important thinkers and thoughts in the field — watch something like that, and you can't possibly think of now as a golden age of television. Note: Oodles of philosophy courses, many thought by famous philosophers, can be found in the section of our list of from Top Universities. Colin Marshall hosts and produces.
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Includes bibliographical references (p. 232-233) and index Introduction. An invitation to philosophy - The Greeks and their world. Before Socrates; Socrates; Plato; Aristotle; The Cynics; The Sceptics; The Epicureans; The Stoics - Christianity and philosophy. Saint Augustine; Medieval philosophy - The beginnings of modern science.
Copernicus; Newton; Machiavelli; Francis Bacon; Hobbes - The great rationalists. Descartes; Spinoza; Leibniz - The great empiricists. Locke; Berkeley; Hume; Burke - Revolutionary French thinkers. Voltaire; Diderot; Rousseau - A golden century of German philosophy. Kant; Schopenhauer; Some comparisons of East and West; Ficht; Schelling; Hegel; Marx; Nietzsche - Democracy and philosophy. The Utilitarians; The American Pragmatists - 20th century philosophy. Frege and modern logic; Russell and analytic philosophy; Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy; Existentialism; Bergson and recent French philosophy; Popper; The future of philosophy 'The essential guide to the history of western philosophy.'