At University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) most of the time, after History class on the Western Tradition I walked with Professor Eugen Weber to his office and stayed with him in his office for a little while. F4om his side fridge in his office he would hand be a strong chilled coke and we talked about the philosophers that he talked about in class.
I simply liked talking to the man and he enjoyed talking to me. He likes to share and impart knowledge. That is the reason why he enjoys teaching and writing and publishing textbooks. He has left leadership positions at UCLA so that he has enough time for teaching, research, and writing. He was Dean of the Social Sciences and also Dean of College of Letters and Science. If he did not recline back to teaching and writing he could eventually become UCLA president. He remarks that he rejected that line of career because of his love of history teaching and writing. He enjoys those very much that he can even it for free.
In his Western Tradition classes Eugen Weber showed brilliance. He had total understanding of Philosophy. He masterfully described the Greek society, Athens, and asked what led a group of people at Athens to become extremely philosophical, 2500 years ago? He speculated on possible putative reasons why at that point in time in the history of people a group of human beings transited from belief to rationalism, philosophy.
The Greeks tried to use their minds to understand their world and sometimes also did some science, as they understood science to be (Aristotle studied plants and animals, Democritus said that the smallest indivisible part of matter is the atom). Beyond the occasional foray into science, what the Greeks were really known for was Philosophy.
Weber went at it explaining the teachings of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and what they contributed to Philosophy. He looked at the various philosophical schools at Athens, such as the Sophists, Zeno and his stoics, Epicure and the various literary schools and the known Greek writers (Antigone, Sophocles).
Having exhausted the Greek world, he segued to the Roman world. Rome did not produce many philosophers; Rome was a martial state; she was too busy conquering the world to devote too much time to thinking; the few thinkers that Rome produced, Weber reviewed, such as Horace, Virgil, Pliny, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Plotinus, and others.
He talked about the fall of Rome around 475 AD and the subsequent death of philosophy and the birth of rule by the RomanCatholicChurch. Europe plunged into what is known as the Dark Ages.
Muslims ransacked the Greek library at Alexandria, Egypt and took what books they could (they also got to India and took Indian mathematics, Algebra), and reintroduced classical Greek and Roman learning to wherever they conquered in southern Europe, Spain, and Southern Italy.
Thus, Greek learning gradually reentered Europe. By the 1200s Europe had recovered its Greek and Roman heritage. The Universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge came into being and began teaching Greek and Roman classics. Writers emerged trying to teach what Greeks and Romans knew about phenomena, folks like Dante, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Meister Eckhart did their writings. The mystics, such as Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, Hilton, and others had their visions of oneness with Christ.
Thereafter, he got into renaissance Europe through modern times; he covered the writings of Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Voltaire, Diderot, Jean Jacque Rousseau, Spinoza, Ludwig Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Nicolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Mill, John Stuart Mill, Charles Fourier, Joseph Proudhon, Robert Owen, Auguste Comte, George Sorel, Henri Saint Simon, Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey and others.
He then zeroed in on modern thinkers, such as the European existentialists, like Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Karl Jasper, Martin Heidegger, and others (why was the USA not a fertile ground for existentialism?).
