Well, the general philosophy course consists of eight topics. And those topics are all pretty central in epistemology and metaphysics, epistemology, the theory of knowledge. What can we know? How can we know it? Metaphysics. What is the nature of things? More importantly, in a way, general philosophy illustrates to you how philosophy is done.
So the importance isn't just the particular topics. It's understanding the discipline of philosophy, how it works, the sorts of considerations that are brought to bear in discussing these topics and so forth. It makes you a better philosopher thinking about these topics. And it's got some historical focus. You'll find that seven out of the eight topics are introduced through literature of the 17th and 18th century, not a lot.
Typically on each of these topics, you'll have one reading that goes back to what we call the early modern period. You might wonder why that. So you came here to study philosophy, not to study history. Why should you be interested in what happened two or three hundred years ago? Well, the point is that these problems became evident there for a good reason.
Certain things were happening in the world. A scientific world view was largely replacing or at least augmenting a predominantly religious view. And a lot of these problems naturally emerged then and they remain important today. But because the problems emerged then, a lot of the labels that we use when discussing these problems are inevitably historical. 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.
So you need to know something about what Descartes said, not necessarily because the way he said it was, particularly it is, remains particularly important today. It's not that we now are going to take his arguments as the last word, but because the discussions today are still reflect the language of the past in some ways. You need to know that. So I've given some examples there of the sorts of labels we get.
Okay. Another point is by studying these philosophers of the past, you were studying people who are undoubtedly great thinkers. Some of the very greatest thinkers they have ever been. You're certainly not wasting time looking at their work. There are still plenty of insights to be gleaned from them. Another point about studying philosophy historically is to do with interconnections between topics.
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. But philosophical ideas aren't normally like that. They have very deep connexions. Taking a view on one one particular position may well commit you to a view on another. Now, one of the great ways of seeing that is to see the interplay between these ideas in historical figures,
to see one great figure arguing against another. And understanding how one view impacts on a different one. 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. So looking at those battles can actually throw a very useful light on modern debates. It is not uncommon to find people debating now in ways that overlook points that were made back then.
And if you know about that history, you were able to find points that were made that remain valid. Again, look, looking at things with a historical perspective can prevent our getting blinkered by what happened to be the concerns of today. So there are all sorts of good reasons for getting some historical perspective in philosophy. You don't have to be, as it were, an antiquarian in order to get value from this sort of discussion.
Okay. Here, briefly off the topics, I'm not going to say very much about these. You know them from the syllabus, scepticism, knowledge, perception, primary and secondary qualities, induction, freewill, mind and body, personal identity. And I've given some notes there of particular big thinkers that we're going to be mentioning as we go through.
So in this lecture in the next, I'm basically focussing on an historical perspective, which I hope will enable you to see how all these different topics tie together, why they arose when they did, why they were so important, and why many of them remain important in subsequent lectures. I'll be looking in detail at each of those topics into.