What is evil?
What is its cause?
What is objectivity – objective morality?
What is the status of reason?
Is the truth about the world accessible to all, if people simply think correctly?
What are virtues?
What is the place of pleasure in life?
How do we discover wrong: as a matter of fact or as a matter of feeling?
Should your mind direct your desires, or should your desires direct your mind?
Can happiness be measured?
Can you prove that an act is right?
What is ‘metaphysical knowledge’, and is it an ancient fiction?
What is modern philosophy and how is it different from ancient philosophy?
What is postmodernism and how is it not modern philosophy?
Is truth really power?

These are some of the one-hundred-or-so questions that we will examine in this course. We will look at the most influential answers given to these questions in the Modern period. If the purpose of this course is to give students philosophical resources for the living of their lives, it will be important to prepare them for the historic challenges to the beliefs of Christians. How do Modern thinkers justify these departures? What must they believe in order to do so?

As thinking adults, we ought to see where the concepts we lean on most have come from. It is a valuable exercise to discover how much of our own understanding of the world has been inherited from thinkers who have worked hard to escape God’s order, as man has always done throughout human history. Are you modern, ancient, postmodern? Know thyself. And determine what you should be.