Topic Index

DescartesThe founder of modern philosophy, who doubted everything in order to place knowledge and the new science on a certain footing.Discussed in 12 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ scientific revolutionThe upheaval in which one settled picture of the universe gave way, and philosophy had to make sense of the new science.Discussed in 7 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ John von NeumannThe polymath who designed the architecture nearly every computer still uses, and helped found game theory and quantum mathematics.Discussed in 10 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ AristotlePlato's greatest student, whose accounts of virtue, form, and the infinite shaped two thousand years of philosophy and science.Discussed in 6 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ causalityThe connection between cause and effect: necessary structure of the world, contingent habit of the mind, or something the mind supplies.Discussed in 6 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ GalileoA founder of the scientific revolution whose experiments and paradoxes unsettled both physics and the mathematics of the infinite.Discussed in 8 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ rationalismThe view that reason alone can deliver substantial knowledge of the world.Discussed in 5 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ CantorThe mathematician who tamed the infinite, proving that some infinities are larger than others.Discussed in 7 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ HumeThe Scottish empiricist whose skepticism about causation and induction posed the challenge later philosophy had to answer.Discussed in 7 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ halting problemThe proof that some questions about programs can never be answered by any computer, today or in any future.Discussed in 6 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ empiricismThe view that all knowledge ultimately comes from the senses.Discussed in 4 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ quantum mechanicsThe most successful physical theory ever tested, and the crisis it creates for any straightforward picture of reality.Discussed in 4 lectures across 3 courses ↗︎ GödelThe logician whose incompleteness theorems proved that mathematics can never fully certify itself.Discussed in 5 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ HilbertThe mathematician whose program to secure the foundations of mathematics set the stage for its most surprising discoveries.Discussed in 5 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ KantThe Enlightenment philosopher who argued that the mind itself structures experience, setting the limits of what we can know.Discussed in 5 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ NewtonThe physicist whose laws of motion and gravity became the model of what a completed science should look like.Discussed in 5 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ SuperpositionThe quantum principle that a system can occupy several states at once until it is measured.Discussed in 5 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ TuringThe founder of computer science, who defined computation itself and asked whether machines can think.Discussed in 5 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ diagonalizationCantor's method of building an item that differs from every item on a list, the engine behind the deepest impossibility proofs.Discussed in 4 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ metaphysicsThe study of what exists and what reality is like at the most general level, beyond what any experiment can settle.Discussed in 4 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ ParmenidesThe pre-Socratic philosopher who argued that being is one and change is impossible, forcing philosophy to take logic seriously.Discussed in 4 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ RussellThe logician and philosopher whose paradox shook the foundations of mathematics.Discussed in 4 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ thinking thingDescartes' answer to what he could not doubt himself to be: a thing that thinks.Discussed in 4 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎ Turing machineAlan Turing's simple imaginary device that defines what it means for anything to be computable.Discussed in 4 lectures across 2 courses ↗︎