Content (Syllabus outline):

• The origins of Western philosophical thought: the beginnings of philosophy in ancient Greece; key characteristics of philosophy and differences between philosophy, religion and science, and between Western, Asian and other reflections on world and man; distinctions between main Western philosophical and cultural traditions. The subject of philosophy.
• Antiquity: origins of culture; pre-Socratic philosophy, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Hellenic philosophy. The doctrine of being and theory of knowledge (ontology and epistemology).
• Middle ages, Renaissance and Humanism: Social and conceptual origins of the middle ages and its historical frame. Nicolas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Michel de Montaigne. Historical types of philosophy; philosophy and religion.
• Early modern philosophy and Enlightenment: René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. Philosophical and historical background of enlightenment and its historical consequences: Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Social philosophy.
• Romanticism and 19th Century: The role of art and culture; national culture. G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer; August Comte; Karl Marx; Friedrich Nietzsche. Philosophical axiology and anthropology.
• Philosophical and cultural currents in 20th Century: existential phenomenology (Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and eksistencializem (Jean-Paul Sartre); psychoanalysis and surrealism (Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek). Logics and analytical philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein). The Frankfurt school; hermeneutics, structuralism. Karl Popper and his critics. Philosophy and science. Linguistic turn: semiotics, structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction (Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida).