Epoché · the history of ideas
Epoché teaches the great ideas the way they were meant to be learned — questioned in dialogue, read in the original, and held in memory by design. 87 thinkers, from Thales to Marie Curie.
From the thinkers themselves · Held, not just heard · A private record of how you think, that's yours to keep.
Begin a lesson — no account needed →Virtue, purpose, logic, and the architecture of the good life.
The theory of Forms, the just city, and the examined life.
Duty, reason, and the limits of what we can know.
The will to power, the death of God, and the revaluation of values.
Harmony, ritual, and the ethics of the well ordered society.
The Stoic statesman on time, anger, fortune, and how to live.
The slave who became Stoicism’s greatest teacher of inner freedom.
The philosopher-emperor whose private journal became a Stoic classic.
The father of Western philosophy, who taught by questioning and died for it.
Everything flows: change, the Logos, and the unity of opposites.
Being is one and unchanging: the way of truth, against the senses.
Doubt, certainty, the thinking self, and the foundations of modern philosophy.
Experience, causation, the limits of reason, and a science of human nature.
The first philosopher: all things are water, and nature explains itself.
Mind (Nous) orders the cosmos; in everything there is a portion of everything.
One infinite substance - God, or Nature - and the path from bondage to blessedness through understanding.
The dialectic, the self-development of Spirit (Geist), and history as the unfolding of freedom.
Atoms and the void: the first thoroughgoing materialism.
Pleasure as tranquillity: the Garden, the swerve, and freedom from fear.
Neoplatonism: the One, emanation, and the soul's flight to the Alone.
The world as blind, striving will - the metaphysics of suffering, and salvation through art and compassion.
The existing individual against the System - subjectivity, the stages of life, anxiety, and the leap of faith.
Two revolutions in the philosophy of language - the picturing of facts, and meaning as use in the games of life.
The founder of Greek skepticism: suspend judgement, and tranquillity follows.
The first and greatest sophist: man is the measure of all things.
Defender of Parmenides: paradoxes that motion and plurality are impossible.
Existence precedes essence, radical freedom, bad faith, and the burden of being human.
The Second Sex, woman as the Other, the ethics of ambiguity, and existentialist feminism.
Being, Dasein, being-in-the-world, authenticity, death, and the question of technology.
Founder of Stoicism: live in agreement with nature, and virtue alone is good.
Power, knowledge, discipline, and the hidden histories of madness, punishment, and sexuality.
The second founder of Stoicism: logic, fate, and the unity of virtue.
Deconstruction, differance, and the claim that there is nothing outside the text.
The laws of motion, gravitation, and the mathematics of the cosmos.
The telescope, the heavens, and the birth of observation.
Natural selection and the deep history of life.
Radioactivity and the invisible architecture of matter.
Optics and the founding of the scientific method.
The three laws, the ellipse, and the marriage of physics to the heavens.
The man who stopped the Sun and set the Earth in motion.
The equations that united electricity, magnetism, and light into one field.
The hidden laws of heredity, found in a monastery garden of peas.
The chemist who proved that life comes only from life, founded germ theory, and built the first laboratory vaccines.
The chemist who found the hidden order of the elements and predicted, from a gap in his table, elements no one had yet seen.
Knowledge is power, and the new method of science.
Natural rights, consent, and the foundations of liberalism.
The Leviathan and the case for absolute sovereignty.
The general will and the paradox of freedom.
Liberty, utility, and the tyranny of the majority.
Power, virtue, and the realities of rule.
Rome’s great orator-statesman, who gave the West natural law and the mixed republic.
Satyagraha, nonviolence, and the soul-force that toppled an empire.
The Art of War: winning through wisdom, deception, and the supreme excellence of not fighting at all.
Separation of powers and the spirit behind a nation's laws.
Democracy, equality, and the new dangers to liberty.
Totalitarianism, the banality of evil, and the dignity of political action.
Common Sense, the Rights of Man, and the pamphleteer who set two revolutions alight.
The Declaration of Independence, natural rights, and the paradox of a slaveholding apostle of liberty.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the founding argument of liberal feminism.
From slave to statesman: literacy, abolition, and holding America to its own ideals.
Double consciousness, the color line, and the sociology of race.
Markets, self interest, and the wealth of nations.
Capital, class, and the engine of history.
Demand, depression, and the role of the state.
Comparative advantage and the logic of trade.
Knowledge, spontaneous order, and the case against planning.
Existence, necessity, and the nature of the soul.
The synthesis of faith and reason, and the five ways.
The limits of philosophy and the renewal of faith.
Reconciling scripture with Aristotelian reason.
Emptiness and the middle way of Buddhist philosophy.
The restless heart, original sin, and the two cities.
The Four Noble Truths, no-self, and the end of suffering.
Divine love, the reed’s lament, and union with God.
Non-dual reality, the illusory world, and the Self as Brahman.
The unity of being, the perfect human, and God’s self-disclosure.
Qualified non-dualism, the personal God, and devotion as the path.
The hidden laws behind the rise and fall of civilisations.
The first histories and the birth of inquiry.
The grand historian and the shaping of Chinese memory.
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
The cycles of history and the making of nations.
The axiomatic method - building all of geometry from a handful of self-evident truths.
Number as the hidden order of the cosmos - and the theorem that bears his name.
The founder of algebra - restoring and balancing equations into a general art.
The universal machine, computability, and whether a machine can think.
The calculus, the dream of a universal logic, and a calculating reason.
epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.