Being and Existence
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Peter discusses the "father of metaphysics," Parmenides, and his argument that all being is one.
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Aristotle rejects Plato's Forms, holding that ordinary things are primary substances. But what happens when we divide such substances into matter and form?
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Avicenna revolutionizes metaphysics with groundbreaking ideas about necessity and contingency, and his new distinction between essence and existence.
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Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence triggers a running debate among philosophers and theologians.
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Mullā Ṣadrā, the greatest thinker of early modern Iran, unveils a radical new understanding of existence.
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From Sabzawārī in the 19th century to Seyyed Hossein Nasr today, Iranian thinkers promote and respond to the thought of Mullā Ṣadrā.
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Little-known authors prepare the way for scholasticism with glosses on logic, metaphysical debate, and a poem about a cat.
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Philip the Chancellor introduces the transcendentals, a key idea in medieval metaphysics and aesthetics.
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Albert the Great’s theory of being and his attempt to explain what changes in the human mind when we come to see God in the afterlife.
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Henry of Ghent, now little known but a leading scholastic in the late 13th century, makes influential proposals on all the debates of his time.
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Duns Scotus attacks the proposal of Aquinas and Henry of Ghent that being is subject to analogy.
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Nāgārjuna founds the Mādhyamaka (“middle way”) Buddhist tradition by “relinquishing all views” and arguing that everything is “empty.”
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A discussion with Jan Westerhoff, an expert on the great Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna, dealing with the notion of emptiness, the tetralemma, and Nāgārjuna's reception in India and Tibet.
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The scholastic and mystic Meister Eckhart sets out his daring speculations about God and humankind in both Latin and German.
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Dietrich of Freiberg, Berthold of Moosburg, John Tauler and Henry Suso explore Neoplatonism and mysticism.
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Gregory Palamas and the controversy over his teaching that we can go beyond human reason by grasping God through his activities or “energies”.
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Was Gemistos Plethon, the last great thinker of the Byzantine tradition, a secret pagan or just a Christian with an unusual enthusiasm for Platonism?
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When the Byzantine empire ended in 1453, philosophy in Greek did not end with it. In this episode we bring the story up to the 20th century.
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Pico della Mirandola argues for the harmony of the ancient authorities, draws on Jewish mysticism, and questions the value of humanist rhetoric.
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Poet, novelist, playwright and philosopher Edouard Glissant, his theory of "creolization", and the Creolists who were influence by him.
