The Story of European Philosophy

When I taught philosophy at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU), the overall curriculum wanted philosophy to be taught from a historical perspective. I think this was not only a practical mistake but a philosophical one. It seemed to be an example of the historical fallacy, the idea that we cannot understand the present without knowing its origins in the past. Rather, I would say that we only need to know the past to understand the present to the extent that the present is causally connected to the past or engages the past. Meaning is overwhelmingly synchronic rather than diachronic.

An easy way to engage philosophy historically was to have the students read Sophie's World. I always told my students that, "As a novel, it is pretty bad, but as a history of philosophy book, it is pretty good." What I meant was that, for the person who is not particularly interested in the history of philosophy, it is a spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

I think philosophy is of course incredibly useful if taught in a pragmatic way and taught topically. I have both written a Western philosophy textbook and put an entire philosophy course on YouTube.

This post is a new series I'm doing on YouTube on the story of European philosophy. It is the old European philosophy that has so often been the philosophy curriculum of colleges and universities. It is horribly lacking because it does not engage all the other philosophies of the world and history. It is basically the lectures I used to give at IWU on Sophie's World.

1. Socrates and the Natural Philosophers
2. Plato and Aristotle
3. Hellenistic Philosophies