The purpose of this course is not to teach you how to tell right from wrong. That is something you will have to figure out for yourself. Instead, the purpose is to explore different ideas of right and wrong and the impact they have on the ways people think and act.
This is Ellen's seminar.
what [they] had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single
idea — an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not
"out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools — like forks
and knives and microchips — that people devise to cope with the
world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are
produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals — that
ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according
to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like
germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they
believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular
and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on
their immutability but on their adaptability.
—Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, preface
“Modern” means different things in different disciplines. In
philosophy, the period that is called “modern” runs from René
Descartes (1596–1650) to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). There are two
routes through this period: “rationalist” and “empiricist.” The
rationalist route runs Descartes, Spinoza (1632–1677), Leibniz
(1646–1716), Berkeley (1685–1753), Kant. The empiricist runs
Descartes, Locke (1632–1704), Hume (1711–1776), Kant. We will study
the empiricists in this course, though the rationalists make good
summer reading if you want to fill the gaps in your history of
philosophy.