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These, the best overview lectures of all time, provide a complete college course in philosophy. Beginners will get clarity and adepts will be revitalized.

Thelma Zeno Lavine’s From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1978) is the most riveting (her painstaking contortionist elocution), endearing (the eerie, theremin-laced Moog soundtrack, straight from the golden age of PBS), and confrontational (her radical politics and censorship-defying critiques) philosophy lecture series ever produced.

In Search: The Contemporary Scene in Philosophy

Thelma’s review of 20-cent. philosophy in only 20 minutes (after her riveting account of Sartre’s brief career as a Marxist) is a miracle of pedagogical engineering! No one has ever summarized it so well and so briefly. Her account of the Analytic vs Continental divide is peerless. A proper summary will be written by the end of today but this ought to give you an idea …

I. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and the Turn to Marxism

A. Sartre’s Conversion

  1. Motivation: Search for “an ethics of deliverance and salvation”
  2. Thesis: “Marxism is the inescapable philosophy of our time”
  3. Existentialism’s subordination to Marxism

B. Existential Crisis and Ontological Longing

  1. Desire to unite being-for-itself with being-in-itself
  2. Recognition: No such synthesis is possible
  3. Consequence: God does not exist → “Man is a useless passion”
  4. Marxism presented as Sartre’s only exit from absurd freedom

C. Sartre’s Political Trajectory

  1. Relations with the Communist Party of France
  2. Support for Stalinism, labor camps, anti-colonial violence (Cuba, China)
  3. Break with the Communist Party in May 1968
  4. Final years: aligned with ultra-leftist positions

II. The Philosophical Scene Beyond Marxism

A. The Major Polarities
1. Descendants of Hume and Hegel in direct opposition

2. Division into two main camps:
— a. Phenomenology / Existentialism
— b. Linguistic Philosophy

B. Phenomenology
1. Foundational figures: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre

2. Core focus:
— a. Quest for certainty (Husserl)
— b. Modes of conscious being in alien world (Sartre, Heidegger)

C. Linguistic Philosophy
1. Revival of Humean empiricism

2. Logical Positivism
— a. Verifiability principle (Vienna Circle)
— b. Attack on metaphysics
— c. Philosophy as clarifying activity

3. Wittgenstein’s Role
— a. Transition from Logical Positivism to Analytic Philosophy
— b. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: picture theory of language; meaninglessness of “philosophic problems”
— c. Philosophical Investigations: theory of language games

4. Analytic Philosophy
— a. Appeal: professional rigor, conceptual clarity
— b. Purpose: dissolve philosophical problems via linguistic analysis

III. Critiques and New Directions

A. Criticism of Major Schools

  1. Phenomenology
  2. Logical Positivism
  3. Analytic Philosophy

B. The Question of Philosophy’s Future

  1. Is philosophy dead?
  2. Need for a renewed vision

C. Possible Renewals

  1. Revitalization of American philosophy (synthesis of Hume and Hegel)
  2. Return to history of philosophy as meaningful resource
  3. Reconnecting philosophy with sciences and arts
  4. All these buried under dominance of Analytic Philosophy

METHOD

Please watch the tiny 27-minute episode before the event. We will then replay a few short clips during the event for debate and discussion. A version with vastly improved audio can be found here:

Summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs (seek the FSTS Book Vault) of the episodes we cover can be found here:

ABOUT PROFESSOR LAVINE

Dr. Lavine was professor of philosophy and psychology as Wells College, Brooklyn College, the University of Maryland (10 years), George Washington University (20), and George Mason University (13). She received the Outstanding Faculty Member award while at the University of Maryland and the Outstanding Professor award during her time at George Washington University.

She was not only a Dewey scholar, but a committed evangelist for American pragmatism.

View all of our coming episodes here.

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