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Well, the general philosophy course consists of eight topics.

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And those topics are all pretty central in epistemology and metaphysics, epistemology, the theory of knowledge.

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What can we know? How can we know it? Metaphysics. What is the nature of things?

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More importantly, in a way, general philosophy illustrates to you how philosophy is done.

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So the importance isn't just the particular topics. It's understanding the discipline of philosophy, how it works,

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the sorts of considerations that are brought to bear in discussing these topics and so forth.

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It makes you a better philosopher thinking about these topics. And it's got some historical focus.

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You'll find that seven out of the eight topics are introduced through literature of the 17th and 18th century, not a lot.

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Typically on each of these topics, you'll have one reading that goes back to what we call the early modern period.

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You might wonder why that. So you came here to study philosophy, not to study history.

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Why should you be interested in what happened two or three hundred years ago?

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Well, the point is that these problems became evident there for a good reason.

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Certain things were happening in the world. A scientific world view was largely replacing or at least augmenting a predominantly religious view.

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And a lot of these problems naturally emerged then and they remain important today.

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But because the problems emerged then, a lot of the labels that we use when discussing these problems are inevitably historical.

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If you don't know what Cartesian dualism is, for example, you will be lost in a lot of modern discussions as well as older ones.

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So you need to know something about what Descartes said, not necessarily because the way he said it was,

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particularly it is, remains particularly important today. It's not that we now are going to take his arguments as the last word,

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but because the discussions today are still reflect the language of the past in some ways.

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You need to know that. So I've given some examples there of the sorts of labels we get.

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Okay. Another point is by studying these philosophers of the past, you were studying people who are undoubtedly great thinkers.

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Some of the very greatest thinkers they have ever been. You're certainly not wasting time looking at their work.

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There are still plenty of insights to be gleaned from them.

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Another point about studying philosophy historically is to do with interconnections between topics.

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If you just study topics in isolation, it's all too easy to view them just as separate things that you can pick and mix.

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But philosophical ideas aren't normally like that. They have very deep connexions.

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Taking a view on one one particular position may well commit you to a view on another.

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Now, one of the great ways of seeing that is to see the interplay between these ideas in historical figures,

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to see one great figure arguing against another. And understanding how one view impacts on a different one.

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So we'll see examples of that in what follows. Many of these themes that arose back in the 17th and 18th centuries, as I've said, remain today.

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So looking at those battles can actually throw a very useful light on modern debates.

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It is not uncommon to find people debating now in ways that overlook points that were made back then.

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And if you know about that history, you were able to find points that were made that remain valid.

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Again, look, looking at things with a historical perspective can prevent our getting blinkered by what happened to be the concerns of today.

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So there are all sorts of good reasons for getting some historical perspective in philosophy.

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You don't have to be, as it were, an antiquarian in order to get value from this sort of discussion.

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Okay. Here, briefly off the topics, I'm not going to say very much about these.

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You know them from the syllabus, scepticism, knowledge, perception,

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primary and secondary qualities, induction, freewill, mind and body, personal identity.

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And I've given some notes there of particular big thinkers that we're going to be mentioning as we go through.

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So in this lecture in the next, I'm basically focussing on an historical perspective,

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which I hope will enable you to see how all these different topics tie together,

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why they arose when they did, why they were so important, and why many of them remain important in subsequent lectures.

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I'll be looking in detail at each of those topics into.