Resources:
- Daily Nous - Rules for History of Philosophy
- Suggested (Starter) Secondary Readings & Primary Readings For Your Library
- PowerPoint Overview
- Web Resources On Key People & Ideas & On-Line Primary Resources
- Survey of Key Figures in Modern Philosophy
Note: links and resources provided do not indicate an endorsement. They are meant only as research aids unless indicated otherwise.
History of (influential western philosophic) Ideas
A growing understanding of the history of ideas—especially (western) philosophical
ideas—is a tremendous asset in doing effective apologetics. Now I’m not thinking of
“effective apologetics” as necessarily convincing the most skeptical or committed non-theist, but effectiveness in terms of doing one’s duty to present a rational defense for Christian theism.
The more thorough and clear one gets about these notions and how they were woven into the intellectual fabric of western thought, the greater the capacity you will have to be clear in your presentations and apologetic explanations. This is because the history of ideas—the received tradition of especially western civilization—from the pre-Socratics onward, provide the conceptual coins of the realm by which our audience (typically in academe) thinks.
This is not to endorse everything that has been said or thought in the history of ideas as gospel truth (after all many of those ideas deeply conflict with each other!), but there are good reasons for taking how we got to where we are intellectually, very seriously. You can count on the fact that most everyone with whom you speak within academe has been influenced in one way or another by this legacy--even if they don’t know it.
To ignore this tradition is to immediately allow yourself to be branded as benighted by the intellectually best of your audience and thereby most likely decrease the opportunity for meaningful dialogue with them. From a missional point of view endorsing that sort of approach (ignoring this legacy) represents an unwillingness to care enough about your audience to learn their culture. So why cast away an important feature of contextualizing the meaning of the gospel and notions which are friendly to it?
In conclusion, let me invite you to begin, if you haven’t already, to take up this life-time task of learning our received tradition and to think about it from an informed Christian perspective. Take a look at the resources on this part of the site and the suggestions about getting started.