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1) Candide
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English
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Description
Candide is about a man who believes in the philosophy that: "what happens, happens for the best in the end" that was taught to him by his personal philosopher Dr. Pangloss. Candide goes through many, many trials and everyone he meets has had something terrible happen to them. He searches the world over for his love Cunegonde. And in the end finds that the simplest things in life: love, friends, and health are all that matters.
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A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness... One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three...
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English
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Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn't write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the “existing being.” In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even “the pretenses of...
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The lectures in Part 6 bring the progress of philosophy into the present day, beginning with the work of Nietzsche and the American pragmatists William James and John Dewey. This section explains the work and consequence of modern linguistic and logical analysis in lectures on Ayer and Wittgenstein. Also discussed is the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss and the attempts to develop rational foundations for values in the Frankfurt School. Finally,...
Series
Language
English
Description
The final section in the series, Part 7 details the skeptical and critical answers reached in the second half of the twentieth century to the questions posed in the previous fifty years. This section covers the work of late twentieth-century philosophers and theorists who focused on two critical features of modernity. One issue focused on modern political theory and practice. The other focused on the ideal of objective scientific rationality and progress....