Moments in Atheism

Class on February 19th will be led by Michael Buckley, S.J., of Boston College. On Friday the 20th Father Buckley will deliver a public lecture on "Atheism and Contemplation." The lecture will be at 3:00 p.m. at the Franke Institute.

Final papers will be due Tuesday, March 2nd, at the beginning of class (1:30 p.m.). Don't believe what the syllabus says.

There will be no class on Thursday, March 4th. (Or on Thursday, March 11th, which is reading day in the College.)

The final exam will be on Thursday, March 18th, from 1:30 to 3:30 in Judd 126.

Here is a pdf version of the syllabus. We haven't been following it slavishly. Here is a list of some important "isms" to help you keep them straight.

• The Ancient World (Democritus, Sophists, Lucretius)
• Faith and Reason (Tertullian, Augustine, Gibbon, Roger Bacon, Aquinas, Ockham)
• The Clockwork Universe (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton)
• Enlightenment I (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Voltaire)
• Enlightenment II (Hume, Kant, d'Holbach, de La Mettrie, Paine)
• Evolution and the Argument from Design (Paley, Hume, Darwin, Huxley)
• Unmasking Religion (Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud)
• 20th Century Explorations: Advocacy to Existentialism (Goldman, O'Hair, Russell, Dawkins, Camus)
• The Pointless Universe (Weinberg, Hawking, Rorty)

Here is a link to Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary. You should read the entries on Atheism (I & II), Religion, and Free Will.

Click on the titles to see the amazon.com entry for each book.

• Thomas Aquinas, A Summa of the Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of the Summa Theologica, ed. Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press).

• Albert Camus, The Plague (Vintage).

• Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Hackett).

• Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (Prometheus).

• Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (W.W. Norton).

• David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Penguin Classics, 1990).
  Also online at Project Gutenberg.

• Immanuel Kant, Basic Writings (Modern Library).

• Gottfried Leibniz, The Monadology (Pittsburgh).
  Read entries 1-6, 37-48, and 82-90.

• Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (Focus).

• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (Vintage).

• Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge).

• Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian (Touchstone).

• Voltaire, Candide (Penguin).