Beginning ~ with ideas about how to live

A Brief Guide to Ideas ~ by William Raeper and Linda Edwards, 1997, philosophy

You might be wondering what philosophy is all about.  Surely it is only for high-flying intellectuals who spend hours thinking?

Philosophy is not just about how to think; it is about how to live.  Philosophy takes a closer look at the ideas behind how we live our lives.  What we think is true affects our view of ourselves and how we treat other people and the world.

Each of us has a mixture of ideas in our heads about ourselves and the world.  These ideas have come from somewhere.  This book takes a look at different ideas — from different times, different people, and different places.

Table of Contents (added for myself, if you don't want to read any more about this book)

Part 1: How and What Can We Know? ~ Epistemology

1 Knowledge and Reason ~ Plato and the Ancient Greeks
2 Theories of Knowledge ~ Plato and Aristotle
3 Faith and Reason ~ Augustine

Part 2: Who Am I? ~ The Question of Identity

4 The Nature of the Soul ~ Aristotle and Identity
5 Mind and Body Divided ~ René Descartes’ Dualism
6 What Price the Soul? ~ Modern Debate on the Mind/Body Problem

Part 3: Does God Exist? ~ Philosophy of Religion

7 From Plato to Bertrand Russell ~ Arguments for the Existence of God
8 The Five Ways ~ Thomas Aquinas
9 The Argument from Religious Experience ~ The Bible and the Mystics

Part 4: Routes to Knowledge ~ Rationalism and Empiricism

10 Knowing through the Mind ~ René Descartes
11 Knowing through our Senses ~ John Locke and Bishop Berkeley
12 The Limits of Knowing ~ David Hume

Part 5: Why Do We Exist? ~ Existentialism

13 Faith: the Highest Way of Living ~ Søren Kierkegaard
14 The Nature of Being ~ Martin Heidegger
15 Free to Choose ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Part 6: All in the Mind? ~ Psychology

16 God as Psychological Projection ~ Ludwig Feuerbach
17 The Unconscious Mind ~ Sigmund Freud
18 The Collective Unconscious ~ Carl Gustav Jung

Part 7: How Should Society Be Organized? ~ Politics

19 The Republic ~ Plato
20 The Ultimate Political Pragmatist ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
21 Class Conflict ~ Karl Marx

Part 8: Is Man the Measure of All Things? ~ Humanism

22 The Rise of Humanism ~ Erasmus and the Renaissance
23 Beyond Good and Evil ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
24 Humanism in the Modern World ~ John Stuart Mill

Part 9: Who is Jesus? ~ The Person of Christ

25 Christology through the Ages ~ Jesus, the Son of God
26 The Kingdom of God ~ Jesus of Nazareth
27 Revelation and Response ~ Some People of Faith

Part 10: What Place Has the Bible? ~ The Question of Interpretation

28 The Struggle for Understanding ~ The Early Christians
29 The Reformation ~ Martin Luther and John Calvin
30 Interpreting the Bible Today ~ Conservatives and Radicals

Part 11: Does Science Have the Answers? ~ Science and Belief

31 Creation and Evolution ~ Charles Darwin
32 The Meaning of Modern Science ~ Einstein and the New Physics
33 Miracles in a Scientific World ~ The Argument with Hume

Part 12: The Nature of Meaning ~ Skepticism and Pluralism

34 The Enlightenment ~ Immanuel Kant
35 Language Games ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
36 Pluralism ~ Reality is Relative

Part 13: What Are the Boundaries of Reality? ~ The Paranormal

37 The Quest for the Transcendent ~ Christianity and the Paranormal
38 The Devil and All His Works ~ Belief in Satan Today
39 The Problem of Evil and Suffering ~ An Age-old Question

Part 14: God the Mother? ~ Feminism

40 The Maleness of Reason ~ A Feminist Viewpoint
41 Patriarchy and Women ~ Mary Wollstonecraft and Others
42 Male and Female in the Bible ~ Feminist Theology

Part 15: Anything Goes? ~ Relativism Versus Certainty

43 Moral Relativism ~ William James and the American Pragmatists
44 Postmodernity ~ Culture in Change
45 Fundamentalism ~ Reality is Certain

Part 16: Renaissance or Delusion? ~ New Age Thinking

46 Shifting the Paradigm ~ Modern New Age Movements
47 The Me-Cult ~ New Age Psychology
48 Tomorrow’s World ~ A Bird’s-eye View

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