Philosophy, religion, and the meaning of life

Description

This course charts how the question of life's meaning has been pursued through the ages, highlighting the Western philosophical and religious paths in the human search for meaningful living. Abstract: This course charts how the question of life's meaning has been pursued through the ages, highlighting the Western philosophical and religious paths in the human search for meaningful living Content: Lecture 1. Meaning : a question and a commitment -- lecture 2. Hero and saint : mapping the cultural genome -- lecture 3. The heroic age : the Greek worldview -- lecture 4. Heroism and the tragic view of life -- lecture 5. Plato : politics, justice, and philosophy -- lecture 6. Plato's Republic : the hero's reward -- lecture 7. The heroic ideal in late Stoicism -- lecture 8. "In the beginning" : the Hebrew worldview -- lecture 9. Father Abraham, the first saint -- lecture 10. Saintly types in the Hebrew Bible -- lecture 11. Jesus as saintly innovator : forgiving love -- lecture 12. Hero or saint? Saul of Tarsus. Lecture 13. Hero or saint? Augustine of Hippo -- lecture 14. Mohammed : the prophet as saintly innovator -- lecture 15. Saint Francis and Dante : saintly troubadours -- lecture 16. The agony and ecstasy of Michelangelo -- lecture 17. Enlightenment patterns of cultural mutation -- lecture 18. Mt. Myrah revisited : saintly transgression -- lecture 19. A history of suspicion : Marx, Darwin, Freud -- lecture 20. Nietzsche : the return of the tragic hero -- lecture 21. Dostoevsky : the return of the saint -- lecture 22. A century of trauma -- lecture 23. The quantum leap -- lecture 24. Existentialism : Sartre and de Beauvoir. Lecture 25. Camus and the absurd hero -- lecture 26. Flannery O'Connor and the mystery of grace -- lecture 27. The Holocaust and the crisis of forgiveness -- lecture 28. Faulkner and Beckett : images of the forlorn -- lecture 29. Viktor Frankl : freedom's search for meaning -- lecture 30. Simone Weil : imagining the secular saint -- lecture 31. Simone Weil : a new Augustine? -- lecture 32. Identifying the secular saint -- lecture 33. The secular saint at the movies -- lecture 34. Ernest Becker : the denial of death -- lecture 35. Terror and hope in a planetary age -- lecture 36. The secular saint : learning to walk upright.