Site • RSS • Apple PodcastsDescription (podcaster-provided):
A series of lectures delivered by Peter Millican to first-year philosophy students at the University of Oxford. The lectures comprise of the 8-week General Philosophy course, delivered to first year undergraduates. These lectures aim to provide a thorough introduction to many philosophical topics and to get students and others interested in thinking about key areas of philosophy. Taking a chronological view of the history of philosophy, each lecture is split into 3 or 4 sections which outline a particular philosophical problem and how different philosophers have attempted to resolve the issue. Individuals interested in the 'big' questions about life such as how we perceive the world, who we are in the world and whether we are free to act will find this series informative, comprehensive and accessible.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Introductory Oxford philosophy lectures • Early modern history: Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant • Knowledge and scepticism: induction, Gettier, internalism/externalism • Perception: primary/secondary qualities, idealism, realism • Mind–body and personal identity • Free will, determinism, moral responsibilityThis podcast presents an introductory philosophy course delivered as a series of Oxford lectures, designed to acquaint listeners with central problems in philosophy and with the methods philosophers use to analyze arguments. It takes a broadly chronological route through early modern thought, setting the transition from Aristotelian natural philosophy to a mechanistic, scientifically oriented worldview, and using figures such as Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume (with a concluding look toward Kant) to frame how philosophical questions develop in response to changes in science and intellectual history.
Across the lectures, recurring themes include how we can justify claims to knowledge and whether sceptical challenges can be answered. The podcast examines the traditional analysis of knowledge and debates about justification, including internalist versus externalist approaches and complications raised by Gettier-style problems, along with wider questions about what standards of knowledge matter in different practical contexts. It also addresses the problem of induction and the difficulty of grounding empirical expectations in pure reason.
Another major strand concerns perception and the relationship between mind and world: primary and secondary qualities, sense-data and resemblance, idealism, and contemporary contrasts between indirect and direct realist accounts. Connected to these are discussions of external-world scepticism and the mind–body problem, including Cartesian dualism and later critiques.
The course also explores agency and selfhood, treating free will, determinism, and moral responsibility through early modern and contemporary perspectives, and culminating in debates about personal identity—what makes someone the same person over time, and the roles of consciousness, memory, and the relation between persons, bodies, and brains.