Area51Warez

World Philosophy
The Teaching Company
Taught by Kathleen M. Higgins, Ph. D., University of Texas
24 Video Lectures, 30 minutes/lecture
This set of twenty-four lectures introduces the student to some of the central views in the world's diverse philosophical traditions. Using the orientation of Western thought as a departure, the course considers some of the alternative worldviews that developed in Africa, the Americas, India, China, and Japan.

Course Lecture Titles

1. Beginnings
2. Western metaphysics
3. Soul and Body
4. The Good Life and the Role of Reason
5. Western and African Thought Compared
6. Traditional Beliefs and Philosophy
7. American Indian Thinking
8. Mesoamerican Thought
9. Ethics and Social Thought in Latin America
10. Indian Though on Supreme Reality
11. The Dualism of the Samkhya School
12. Vedic Thought and Monism
13. The Bhagavad Gita
14. The Buddha’s Teachings
15. Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism
16. Nagarjuna’s Interpretation of Buddhism
17. The Chinese Conception of Reality
18. Confucius
19. Confucian Virtue
20. Confucian Schools – Mencius and Xunzi
21. The Daoist Response to Confucianism
22. Daoism and Early Buddhism in China
23. Buddhism in China and Japan
24. Synthesis

About Your Professor

Kathleen M. Higgins holds the rank of professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has been teaching since 1982. She did undergraduate work at Saint Mary College in Leavenworth, Kansas, and the University of Missouri – Kansas City, where she received her B.A. in music in 1977. She did graduate work in philosophy at Yale University, receiving her M.A. in 1978, her M. Phil. In 1978, and her Ph. D. in 1982.

Professor Higgins has taught at the University of California, Riverside, and she is a regular visiting professor at the University of Auckland. Her academic honors include appointments as Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center (1993) and Visiting Fellow of the Australian National University Philosophy Department and the Canberra School of Music (1997). She also received an Alumni Achievement Award from the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri – Kansas City (1999).

Professor Higgins is the author of The Music of Our Lives (Temple University Press), Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science (Oxford University Press), and Nietzshe’s Zarathustra (Temple University Press), which was named one of the outstanding academic books of 1988-1989 by Choice. She is also co-author of three books with her husband, Robert Solomon, who is a professor of philosophy and business at the University of Texas at Austin. These are A Short History of Philosophy (Oxford University Press0, A Passion for Wisdom (Oxford University Press), and What Nietzshe Really Said (Schocken Books). Professor Higgins has also edited books on ethics, Nietzsche, nineteenth-century philosophy, erotic love, aesthetics, and world philosophy. She has co-edited several of these with Professor Solomon, including From Africa to Zen: An Invitation to World Philosophy (Roman and Littlefield) and World Philosophy: A Text with Readings (McGraw-Hill).

Professors Higgins and Solomon have also released a series of lectures on Nietzsche entitled The Will to Power: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (with The Teaching Company).