Taught by Professor of Philosophy James D. Reid, of the Metropolitan State University of Denver, this course traces the revolution in ideas that marked the transition from the medieval worldview to modern rationalist thought, which forms the foundation of science, law, and ethics. The course focuses on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, as well as influential but lesser-known philosophers.
Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes and the Rationalists
Four centuries ago, bold thinkers put reason in the driver’s seat. Meet the rationalist philosophers who changed the course of the modern world.
Rated 5 out of
5
by
creader from
Philosophy lectures for serious students
Dr. Reid has done a masterful job, and in my view he has delivered exactly what philosophy lectures should be; for each philosopher under discussion, Dr. Reid defines terms, he clarifies concepts, and he analyzes arguments. You come away with a better understanding of the development of early modern philosophy, and what the arguments were about. I agree with another reviewer that this is not at the 101 level, but it is exactly what I have been looking for. This is truly a college-level course, and not infotainment. Be prepared to seriously engage with the ideas under discussion, and to seriously engage with the lectures. Dr. Reid’s delivery was calm and professional, which I also appreciated; I wish I had had such professors! I have certainly benefited from this course, and I sincerely appreciate Dr. Reid’s efforts and his insights. To my mind, the final lecture alone was worth the price of admission. Well done, Sir, and I look forward to future courses which I will purchase immediately upon release!
Date published: 2024-12-29
Rated 5 out of
5
by
the professor from
Deep Review of Rationalists Descartes and Spinoza
Professor James D. Reid takes the learner on a very deep and rich walk through modern philosophy, centered primarily on the works of Descartes and Spinoza. Coincidently, this writer had started enjoying for a second time, the TGC's outstanding lecture set titled, 'A Study of Modern Contemporary Western Philosophy, delivered by Professor Lawrence Cahoone. Dr. Cahoone's teaching was presented as an initial introduction to the works of the primary philosophers of the time, which is more of a 101 course, whereas Dr. Reid's 'Early Modern Philosophy' for me was a 401 course. Both courses profoundly enrich the Learner's understanding of the intellectual foundations that continue to influence our daily lives today. Dr. Reid delivers the course stoically somewhat as a church minister would instruct the congregation on bible chapters. He does at times exude passion and enthusiasm but primarily is preaching rather then engaging the student. I greatly enjoyed Dr. Reid's course and especially the very deep thought provoking insights. This is a course that I must rewatch to gain its full value. As with the philosophers, Dr. Reid's course urges the learner to explore profound questions about existence, knowledge, and morality. Lady Anne Conway's writings were new to this writer and offered diverse insights and research into her treatise. I highly recommend this course and Dr. Reid's wealth of knowledge, and look forward to his future courses.
Date published: 2024-12-19
Rated 5 out of
5
by
Ruby Belle from
Superb lecturer; challenging course
This was a challenging course, which I appreciated. If you're primarily visual, it'll help to have the text to refer to. I loved that Reid added information about the women who were in philosophical conversation with the major players (Lady Anne Conway blew my mind.). In all, this was a well-balanced course with a focus on both the details and the bigger picture--what are these investigations for and how they are relevant in today's world.
Date published: 2024-12-13
Rated 5 out of
5
by
Russ650 from
Thoroughly enjoyable course
Couldn’t let this rest til I was through the entire course! Flowed well from one lecture to the next. The concepts were clearly explained by each philosopher in the time periods and relative to one another. If one of the goals in this course was to engage the average thinker, the layman, those of us with an avid interest in philosophy but without formal education, I’d say Professor Reid nailed it! While philosophical, it was full of theological and biblical concepts throughout as well giving consideration striking a perfect balance to diverse realms of thought.
If you’re an internet consumer on the usual platforms where free content like this is available such as YouTube, I believe you’ll find this series of lectures unique and refreshing to say the least!
Date published: 2024-12-12
Rated 4 out of
5
by
EngineerinVA from
This short course (12 lectures) is largely about French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and contemporary philosophers who engaged him. Dr. Reid shows how Descartes took philosophy in a new direction, questioning how we can be confident that something is true (epistemology) and earning the title of father of modern philosophy. He shifted philosophy from a revelatory basis to a rational basis.
• Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618-1680) corresponded with Descartes particularly on moral issues and she challenged him in a number of areas including the mind-body paradox.
• Lady Anne Conway (1631-1679), whose philosophy took a religious bent, focused on religion that is based in philosophically or rationality as opposed to revelation.
• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) took Descartes’ project a step further. Whereas Descartes sought a rational explanation for the revealed religion, Spinoza sought to replace religion with a rational philosophy. Thus, he was the heretic philosopher, excommunicated by Jews and Christians alike.
• Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), a French priest, challenged Descartes’s empiricism. Rather than holding that ideas come to us from our senses, Malebranche held that our perceptions come to us from God. Indeed, God is the cause of all things.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) was a polymath but he interacted with Descartes regarding the concept of truth and on morality.
Dr. Reid is a smooth speaker although this proved to be a problem for me. I am not particularly fluent in philosophy and Dr. Reid did not dumb down his lectures for noobs like me. Dr. Reid presents philosophy as it is and he expects his audience to follow it. I respect that even if I didn’t benefit from it as much as I would have liked.
Dr. Reid’s credibility is strengthened by his uncanny resemblance to Benedict Cumberbatch in Dr. Strange.
Because the straight philosophy was hard for me, I found the course guide to be particularly valuable. It is written in narrative format and it averages about seven pages per lecture, which is about average for The Great Courses (TGC). Its graphics are more decorative than useful. It has no appendices. A glossary of philosophical terms might have been a good idea.
I used the video streaming version. As of 2024, it was available in audio streaming, DVD, and audible. There were not many graphics so that one could use audio-only format such as while driving or exercising.
The course was published in 2004.
My rating system:
5 Stars – Every TGC customer should take this course
4 Stars – Recommended
3 Stars – Go ahead and take it
2 Stars – Not recommended
1 Stars – Yuck
Date published: 2024-12-12
Rated 4 out of
5
by
Driftless T from
Detailed look at a critical period
Presenter James Reid goes to the details of the ideas of several early modern writers, how they relate to each other and to the classics. Not for the philosophical faint of heart. Reid gets down in the weeds...but that's good. I liked his use of original quotes.
Reid has a command of the language almost to a fault. His ability to speak in complex sentences sometimes had me clicking rewind to remind me of where we started. But all in all a pleasant speaker and easy listen.
Date published: 2024-12-10
Rated 4 out of
5
by
BaruchCXXIII from
The content Spinoza, Leibniz
'How does a mixed marriage work?'
asked friend of my father one dinner time. My father was married as an Agnostic, a Physicist of Jewish Ancestry, chased from his culture by Hitler, married to an Irish Roman Catholic. No man I knew, such as my father believed more in Heimat, not as a social entity, not indeed as a national artefact but as a cultural communion of Wisdom.'
He replied
' We are not a mixed marriage. My wife and I are united Ethically, The rest is flummery, rituals, pageants, ceremonies to celebrate a formula of words, but if one sees those words as functions, as diverse ways of articulating the same concept,, according to cultures and personalities, knowledge and experience, then devotion to an Ethical autonomy is secure from piety and fanaticism and literality. To see a marriage as mixed, is to place provenance above essence.'
Another time he said, on being asked about Quantum Theory
'
A Quantum shift is a saucy little garment , it reveal s a plethora of charms, a semantic shift is made of flannel
and again
'I see a straight line of Ethics from Christ to Kant via Luther via Maimonides Spinoza, Pascal and Diderot.Whilst I do not subscribe Luther, in many respects, but once one transforms words into concepts, once we look at the functional meaning of words in their rhetorical contexts then Love, Faith Ethics, Wisdom, Liberty,, are a common culmination of diverse idiom and concepts and Jesus was as categorical in his imperative as Kant... For Spinoza God was just a term, just as for Isis her head dress connoted not a throne but Power. Her very name in Greek is Energy. Love your neighbour is central to every statement of human rights, however differently the currency of the expression. What Luther did was the eleusis of Ethical Autonomy from the hades of the Universal church..
On grace he said to a Catholic priest and a congregational minister, .for our house was a popular venue for the religious,,
'Grace is living in contnt with the laws of Thermodynamics.'
The title of John Mortimer's auto biography was ]nA voyage round my father.'
I have followed many courses, including this one, and all have been valuable and informative ,insightful. One does not attend a lecture for information but perspective, for an insight through the prism of another's synoptic contemplation.. I came to this course because as valuable as the other course have been in grinding my own prism, I was aware of a Gap in the address to the problems that other courses not; not illuminated, not even mentioned, Descartes is common to all a sort of Terminus, a Gare St. Lazare of lines of thought, setting out or culminating in Je pense donc Je suis. Cogito ergo sum Spinoza, Leibniz. Stations of the Ankh. My own regret, since he mentioned him so often during the course, is that he did not extend to Kant, or Pascal I am a Marxist predicated on Kant not Hegel, If you invert Hegel you have Kant., without Ethics you have alienation rather than saper aude , one has Anomie, or the destruction of self. Anomie rather than a life of Grappling with the challenge. Qui suis je. Is capable of being translated Who do I follow if suivre is used instead of értre.
I was grateful for this course, it filled a gap,not as completely as I hoped ,with Kant,but, even so Spinoza, Anne Finch, and Leibniz is no mean offering with which to grapple and I thought the course interesting, if difficult. It requires several visits which is why it is a good idea to subscribe to the wonders of the world in The Great Courses. There is not another resource like it,,but I wish Professor Reid had been sitting in that green room with the window onto that red brick wall with the creeper because I have grown fond of that room, comfortable with its humanity, I felt at home, however for this course perhaps a tutorial style was rather more apt than lectures.. I will not go into detail about the contents but my review establishes a provenance and a scope. I understand my father' rather better now.
Date published: 2024-11-28
Overview
About
James D. Reid is a Professor of Philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and has taught ethics and the history of philosophy there and at several other schools. He received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support translation work on Martin Heidegger and an NEH award for scholarship in German Romantic philosophy and poetry. He is an author, editor, and translator and the series cofounder and editor of the Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry.
Trailer
01: Philosophy at the Dawn of the Modern Age
Explore the intellectual climate in the 16th and 17th centuries, when early modern philosophy took off. What makes this philosophical movement modern? And what connects it to ancient and medieval philosophy? Professor Reid previews the thinkers covered in the course, and examines their connection to the ongoing Scientific Revolution and the concurrent Reformation that was dividing Christians.
31 min
02: René Descartes’s Quest for Certainty
A pioneer of early modern philosophy, René Descartes set the goal of building a foundation for knowledge that is absolutely certain. Trace the chain of reasoning in his Meditations on First Philosophy that led him to the self-evident truth of his own thinking existence. From this foundation, he demonstrates the existence of God. Look at other conclusions reached by Descartes in this remarkably subtle work.
36 min
03: Descartes’s Method and Motives
Why was Descartes so obsessed with certainty? Delve into The Discourse on the Method, which includes an intellectual autobiography. A key step was the time he spent alone in a stove-heated room, when he concluded that a single individual using reason can get closer to the truth than the aggregate of learning contained in all books. Follow the revolutionary deductions he reached by applying this method.
30 min
04: Elisabeth of Bohemia and Cartesian Ethics
In his Discourse, Descartes outlines a provisional moral code, but the full development of his ethical system emerges through his correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. A gifted philosopher, she posed challenging questions that prompted him to rigorously refine his ideas. Their colloquy explored happiness, virtue, emotions, and the passions, with a strong emphasis on practical ethics.
31 min
05: Lady Anne Conway’s Vitalist Metaphysics
Descartes’s works prompted Lady Anne Conway, a reclusive English noblewoman and philosopher, to set down her own ideas, which bridged metaphysics, ethics, and theology in sharp contrast to Descartes’s system. Drawing on her posthumously published treatise, Dr. Reid summarizes her influential critique of Cartesian dualism and her vitalist conception of all reality, which incorporates reincarnation.
33 min
06: Baruch Spinoza on God and Nature
While Descartes argued that mind and body are two distinct substances, Baruch Spinoza, proposed that there is only one substance, which he identified as God or Nature. Everything else, including mind and body, are modes or expressions of this one substance. Spinoza’s God is not a personal deity but an infinite, impersonal substance that encompasses all of reality.
31 min
07: Spinoza on Mind and Emotion
Continue your study of Spinoza’s Ethics by focusing on his philosophy of mind, notably his theory of emotions. Spinoza held that despite their fluid nature, emotions are far from random or irrational. Instead, they are part of the natural order, arising from encounters with external objects or events that affect the body, which in turn affects the mind. This was a highly innovative view at the time.
32 min
08: Spinoza on Bondage and Freedom
Spinoza’s theory of emotions leads to his account of bondage and freedom. Bondage relates to actions over which we have no control, while freedom is detachment from those emotions that hold us captive. These represent two opposing ways of living—one that results in frustration and suffering, and another that brings fulfillment and peace. The latter is the fundamental goal of his Ethics.
32 min
09: Nicolas Malebranche’s Occasionalism
After reading Descartes, priest and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche broke with the medieval Scholastic view, which was inspired by Aristotle, and developed his own doctrine of occasionalism. This integrated Cartesian metaphysics with a vision of divine intervention. Although rooted in a theistic framework, Malebranche’s ideas influenced later, more secular thinkers such as Hume and Kant.
26 min
10: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on Truth and Being
A co-inventor of calculus with Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is best known as a philosopher who built a unified explanation of reality. He called his explanatory agents monads—indivisible, non-physical entities that account for being, perception, consciousness, and other natural phenomena, and play a key role in Leibniz’s understanding of truth. Explore this powerful and subtle system.
33 min
11: Leibniz on Morality and the Problem of Evil
In his satire Candide, Voltaire makes fun of Leibniz’s idea that God has created “the best of all possible worlds.” What led Leibniz to this conclusion, and how does he account for the obvious shortcomings of the universe, notably evil? Examine his distinction between metaphysical, physical, and moral forms of evil. And consider his views on freedom, moral choice, and the aspiration to perfection.
30 min
12: Rationalism Then and Now
In this last lecture, Professor Reid asks how the thinkers presented in the course shed light on today’s debates. Although early modern philosophers often disagree, they are committed to reason as the only hope for a more truthful way of inhabiting the world. Being philosophers, they accept that on matters of fundamental philosophical importance, reasonable people should be free to disagree.
30 min
