A Brief History of Western Thought

This course presents a brief introductory survey of the evolution of the Western worldview, beginning with its roots in Greco-Roman culture and the Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Following its development through the medieval period to the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution, the course explores the gradual transformation of the modern worldview, established during the Enlightenment and counterbalanced by Romanticism, into the radically pluralistic postmodern sensibility and increasingly global civilization of the present period. Familiarity with the grand lines of Western intellectual and spiritual history was long considered the mark of an educated person in the West, and to a crucial extent this is still the case. Such knowledge is a necessary part of what we require to comprehend the larger context of our own critical moment in history, which has been fundamentally shaped, for better and for worse, by the powerfully dynamic character of the Western mind and its evolution.