What Would Socrates Do? by Peter Kreeft: CD Audiobook Cover
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What Would Socrates Do?: History of Moral Thoughts and Ethics (Portable Professor Series) by Peter Kreeft

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(Compact Disc - Unabridged, 8 CD's, Book-length Course G)

  • Pub. Date: November 2004

Reader Rating: (24 ratings)

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    Product Details

    • Pub. Date: November 2004
    • Publisher: Barnes & Noble
    • Format: Compact Disc

    Synopsis

    PORTABLE PROFESSOR™ is a series of exciting and informative lectures recorded by some of today's most renowned university and college professors. Each course introduces listeners to fascinating, and sometimes startling, insights into the intellectual forces that shape our understanding of the world. Each package includes 14 riveting lectures presented by notable professors as well as a book-length course guide.

    The act of distinguishing between right and wrong, and to act accordingly—that is, the pursuit of a thoughtful life, well-lived-is a core component of the human experience. "The unavoidability of ethics," as Professor Peter Kreeft puts it, forms the basis of this intriguing set of lectures, which explores the history of moral thought and ethics by examining millennia of relevant philosophical and religious texts.

    COURSE LECTURES

    1. Being Good and Everything Else: An Introduction
    2. Being Good and Being Traditional: Why Do We Call It "Ancient Wisdom"?
    3. Being Good and Being Wise: Can Virtue Be Taught?
    4. Being Good and Being Pious: Plato's Euthyphro
    5. Being Good and Being Happy: Plato's Republic
    6. Aristotle's Ethics
    7. Being Good and Being Successful: Aquinas on What Is the Meaning of Life?
    8. Being Good and Being Successful According to Machiavelli: Is It Either/Or?
    9. Being Good and Being Evil: Is Humanity Naturally Good? (Hobbes vs. Rousseau)
    10. Being Good and Being Scientific: Can Morality Be a Science? (Descartes,Hume, Mill)
    11. Being Good and Being Fair: The Ethics of Kant
    12. Being Good and Being Secular: Can an Atheist Be Ethical? The Ethics of Jean-Paul Sartre
    13. Being Good in Eastern Ethics
    14. Final Questions: Who's to Say Who's Right?

    Peter Kreeft is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He has degrees from both Calvin College and Fordham University, where he also earned his Ph.D. He has taught a broad range of courses covering scores of topics related to philosophy and religion and has written numerous books on similar topics, including Socrates Meets Jesus: History's Greatest Questioner Confronts the Claims of Christ.

    Customer Reviews

    Full of fallaciesby Anonymous

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    January 19, 2010: Professor's Keeft's history lectures are interesting and useful, but he dilutes this with his obvious (and preachy) support of religion and God. Whenever he interjected his own views, I had to roll my eyes because the fallacies where clearly identifiable (God of the gaps fallacy, appeal to tradition, etc).

    His arguments essentially boiled down to the following: Without God or deity, human experience/life has no goals or process to work towards and therefore no need for ethics. Humans ARE in fact ethical and behave as though working towards some purpose, so therefore that purpose must exist and therefore god exists.

    This is obviously fallacious. Evolutionary theory easily explains how humans could have ethics without the existence of God or higher purpose and meaning in life (morally acting humans have a greater fitness, and therefore are selected for). He doesn't even begin to address this at all.

    I understand that most of the history he covers is well before evolution was even postulated, but if he's going to insist on inserting his own, modern opinions, he should be considering modern science and knowledge (rather than simply decrying how modern man has become unethical time wasters... give me a break!).

    Kreeft seems to be stuck in an age where belief and conjecture was treated as certainty, but data from observation and rationality was treated skeptically.

    His personal feelings about ethics made it difficult to take the rest of lecture seriously. Why can't we be rational about ethics?

    Outstanding History of Ethics.by Anonymous

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    May 23, 2008: I have listened to 10 or 11 courses of the Portable Professor Series and this is the best to date. Excellent history of ethics, well paced, very entertaining, thought provoking. Great lecture for a small investment. I wish all in the series were as good as this one.


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