Philosophy is best understood as a "great conversation" held across hundreds of years. All philosophers—and we are all philosophers or their followers—have the same eternal questions:

• What is the nature of the world and what can we know about it?
• What is the best kind of life?
• How should we govern ourselves and each other?

There are no final answers, but some answers are far better than others.

These lectures link the concerns of geniuses across centuries with the same fundamental questions, making their debates our own.

Thinkers covered include Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Erasmus, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Mill, Darwin, Marx, Freud, James, Wittgenstein, and Turing, among others.