The Big Questions of Philosophy

Course Overview

Learn to think clearly, shun fallacies, and reach your own conclusions as you confront the questions that have puzzled generations of philosophers.

Course No. 4130

We have all pondered seemingly unanswerable but significant questions about our existence – the biggest of all being, “Why are we here?” This course gives you the tools to follow and create logical arguments while exploring famous philosophers’ viewpoints on essential questions including:

• What is knowledge?
• Does God exist?
• Do humans have free will?
• What is right and wrong?
• How should society be organized?

Join Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Marx, Rawls, and many others in an exploration of fundamental questions. Discover how great thinkers have offered convincing answers, faced persuasive objections, and refined debates to bring issues into sharper focus.

Video Lectures

01: How Do We Do Philosophy? (33 min)

Explore the kinds of problems philosophy addresses and why it’s arguably the most important pursuit there is.

02: Why Should We Trust Reason? (31 min)

Identify categories of fallacious reasoning and learn how to check your arguments for flaws.

03: How Do We Reason Carefully? (31 min)

Study Aristotle’s axioms of logic and the difference between truth and validity in arguments.

04: How Do We Find the Best Explanation? (33 min)

Examine abduction (inference to best explanation) used in philosophy, medicine, and science.

05: What Is Truth? (30 min)

Investigate three philosophical theories of truth: pragmatism, coherentism, and correspondence.

06: Is Knowledge Possible? (31 min)

Analyze Descartes’ celebrated struggle with justifying belief and acquiring knowledge.

07: What Is the Best Way to Gain Knowledge? (32 min)

Test empiricism through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, with Kant’s response.

08: Do We Know What Knowledge Is? (32 min)

Address Edmund Gettier’s famous problem challenging the traditional definition of knowledge.

09: When Can We Trust Testimony? (32 min)

Evaluate Hume’s argument that testimony can never justify belief in miracles.

10: Can Mystical Experience Justify Belief? (32 min)

Consider whether religious experiences can justify specific religious beliefs.

11: Is Faith Ever Rational? (33 min)

Examine arguments by Pascal, Clifford and James about the rationality of faith.

12: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (31 min)

Test cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence.

13: What Is God Like? (31 min)

Explore difficulties with the traditional attributes of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God.

14: How Could God Allow Moral Evil? (32 min)

Evaluate theological solutions to the problem of evil like the Holocaust.

15: Why Would God Cause Natural Evil? (32 min)

Consider explanations for natural evils like earthquakes and plagues.

16: Are Freedom and Foreknowledge Compatible? (32 min)

Examine omnitemporalism – the view that the future already exists.

17: Do Our Souls Make Us Free? (33 min)

Explore the concept of the soul and neuroscience’s challenge to free will.

18: What Does It Mean to Be Free? (32 min)

Evaluate compatibilism – the view that free will is compatible with determinism.

19: What Preserves Personal Identity? (32 min)

Investigate what defines a person and maintains identity over time.

20: Are Persons Mere Minds? (32 min)

Test Locke’s memory theory and psychological continuity views of personal identity.

21: Are Persons Just Bodies? (33 min)

Examine the bodily criterion of identity and biological objections.

22: Are You Really You? (32 min)

Consider perdurantism – the view that persons extend across time.

23: How Does the Brain Produce the Mind? (33 min)

Address the “hard problem” of consciousness and competing explanations.

24: What Do Minds Do, If Anything? (32 min)

Evaluate property dualism, epiphenomenalism, and eliminative materialism.

25: Could Machines Think? (33 min)

Explore functionalism and John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment.

26: Does God Define the Good? (31 min)

Examine divine command theory – the view that morality comes from God.

27: Does Happiness Define the Good? (32 min)

Study utilitarianism through Epicurus, Bentham and Mill.

28: Does Reason Define the Good? (32 min)

Analyze Kant’s categorical imperative and its limitations.

29: How Ought We to Live? (33 min)

Consider virtue ethics and the cultivation of moral character.

30: Why Bother Being Good? (31 min)

Examine Plato’s Republic and the individual’s achievement of virtue.

31: Should Government Exist? (32 min)

Explore philosophical anarchism and justifications for government.

32: What Justifies a Government? (30 min)

Compare Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau’s social contract theories.

33: How Big Should Government Be? (32 min)

Contrast Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes’ economic views.

34: What Are the Limits of Liberty? (32 min)

Apply Mill’s On Liberty to modern issues like drugs and free speech.

35: What Makes a Society Fair or Just? (32 min)

Compare Rawls and Nozick’s competing visions of a just society.

36: What Is the Meaning of Life? (35 min)

Synthesize course insights to probe life’s ultimate question from multiple perspectives.