pt. 1. disc 1. From the Upanishads to Homer -- Philosophy, did the Greeks invent it? -- Pythagoras and the divinity of number -- What is there? -- The Greek tragedians on man's fate -- Herodotus and the lamp of history -- disc 2. Socrates on the examined life -- Plato's search for truth -- Can virtue be taught? -- Plato's Republic, man writ large -- Hippocrates and the science of life -- Aristotle on the knowable.

pt. 2. disc 3. Aristotle on friendship -- Aristotle on the perfect life -- Rome, the stoics, and the rule of law -- The stoic bridge to Christianity -- Roman law, making a city of the once-wide world -- The light within, Augustine on human nature -- disc 4. Secular knowledge, the idea of university -- The reappearance of experimental science -- Scholasticism and the theory of natural law -- The Renaissance, was there one? -- Let us burn the witches to save them.

pt. 3. disc 5. Francis Bacon and the authority of experience -- Descartes and the authority of reason -- Newton, the saint of science -- Hobbes and the social machine -- Locke's Newtonian science of the mind -- No matter? The challenge of materialism -- disc 6. Hume and the pursuit of happiness -- Thomas Reid and the Scottish school -- France and the philosophes -- The federalist papers and the great experiment -- What is Enlightenment? Kant on freedom -- Moral science and the natural world.

pt. 4. disc 7. Phrenology, a science of the mind -- The idea of freedom -- The Hegelians and history -- The aesthetic movement, genius -- Nietzsche at the twilight -- The liberal tradition, J.S. Mill -- disc 8. Darwin and nature's "purposes" -- Marxism, dead but not forgotten -- The Freudian world -- The radical William James -- William James' pragmatism -- Wittgenstein and the discursive turn.

pt. 5. disc 9. Alan Turing in the forest of wisdom -- Four theories of the good life -- Ontology, what there "really" is -- Philosophy of science, the last word? -- Philosophy of psychology and related confusions -- Philosophy of mind, if there is one -- disc 10. What makes a problem "moral" -- Medicine and the values of life -- On the nature of law -- Justice and just wars -- Aesthetics, beauty without observers -- God, really?