| DISCOVERING THE HUMANITIES |
1-The Prehistoric Past and the Earliest Civilizations:
2-The Greek World: The Classical Tradition
3-Empire: Urban Life and Imperial Majesty in Rome, China, and India
4-Flowering of Religion: Faith and the Power of Belief in Early First Millennium
5-Fiefdom & Monastery, Pilgrimage & Crusade: Early Medieval World in Europe
6-Gothic and Rebirth of Naturalism: Civic and Religious Life in an Age of Inquiry
7-The Renaissance: Florence, Rome, and Venice
8-Renaissance and Reformation in the North: Between Wealth and Want
9-Encounter and Confrontation: The Impact of Increasing Global Interaction
10-Counter-Reformation and the Baroque: Emotion, Inquiry, and Absolute Power
11-Enlightenment and the Rococo: Claims of Reason and the Excess of Privilege
12-The Age of Revolution: From Neoclassicism to Romanticism
13-The Working Class and Bourgeoisie: The Conditions of Modern Life
14-The Modernist World: The Arts in an Age of Global Confrontation
15-Decades of Change: The Plural Self in a Global Culture
16-IM
Thinking Critically About Profound Ideas
1. What Is Philosophy? Thinking Philosophically About Life
2. What Is the Philosopher’s Way? Socrates and the Examined Life
3. Who Are You? Consciousness, Identity, and the Self
4. Are You Free? Freedom and Determinism
5. How Can We Know the Nature of Reality? Philosophical Foundations
6. What Is Real? What Is True? Further Explorations
7. Is There a Spiritual Reality? Exploring the Philosophy of Religion
8. Are There Moral Truths? Thinking About Ethics
9. What Are Right Actions? Constructing an Ethical Theory
10. What Is Social Justice? Creating a Just State
Religion
New philosophies and religions arose in both east and west, particularly around the 6th century BC. Over time, a great variety of religions developed around the world, with Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia being some of the earliest major faiths. In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were Taoism, Legalism, and Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would attain predominance, looked not to the force of law, but to the power and example of tradition for political morality. In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by the works of Plato and Aristotle, was diffused throughout Europe and the Middle East by the conquests of Alexander of Macedon in the 4th century BC.
Abrahamic religions are those religions deriving from a common ancient tradition and traced by their adherents to Abraham (circa 1900 BCE), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, where he is described as a prophet (Genesis 20:7), and in the Quran, where he also appears as a prophet. This forms a large group of related largely monotheistic religions, generally held to include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and comprises over half of the world's religious adherents.
