Скачать или смотреть Core Elements, Part One, Lecture One: The Legacy of the 17th Century

Core Elements, Part One, Lecture One: The Legacy of the 17th Century
One of the fundamental contentions of this series is that the 17th Century marked a radical break in the intellectual history of the West. On the one hand, faced with the reality of the death of Bruno at the hand of the Inquisition and the near death of Galileo for much the same reason, Descartes decided to burn his "theory of everything" and retrenched. That retrenching was marked by his writing of the Meditations. In effect, intellectually, it returned the world to terracentric cosmology that was central to the Christian view of the world. With the publication of the Mediations, The Age of Denial began.
On the other hand, in 1624, Edward Herbert published De Veritate - a book which constituted an outright rejection of the apriori view of the world that had come time dominate the West through the liked of Thomas Aquinas. Herbert argued that any viable view of the world, any definition of what it means to be human could only be derived aposteriori. Little did Herbert realize that many of the assumptions he made - especially the implicit argument that the world in which humans found themselves was intelligible to such an extent that regardless of who observed the world, the conclusion would be the same.
In point of fact, that did not happen. The consequences of letting go of an apriori view of human nature would be profound and would lead to where we are now - a world in which what is good is what is good for me.
In this lecture we will lay the foundation for all of Part One of this series.