Rights, Justice and the Bounds of Liberty, Essays in Social Philosophy Book

I desperately wanted to come away liking this and feeling that I had really learned something and grown. Unfortunately it triggered a lot of annoyance over complaints that I frequently have about academic work within the social sciences.

Let's start with the good: The professor is clearly a broadly-read and deeply informed expert in his field. He has a pleasant voice, so there is nothing grating about listening to him for 30 some hours. The ideas are clear, and the course overall is so clearly structured that you have a sense, throughout the audio course, of precisely where you are in history and what preceded it. Robinson is capable of explaining the intersection and influences of the various philosophers he discusses.

Where it falls flat however is simply in garnering interest. I was so. Damned. Bored. And I like this topic! Robinson has fallen into the classic professorial trap of being a brilliant man who is incapable of making his topic relevant to his students, and therefore equally incapable of holding their interest.

The other major criticism I have is of the topics themselves. While it was a personal preference of mine to become better versed on the big political philosophers, I understand that that was not the purpose of this course, and it certainly did not deliver on that. So much time and attention is given to the Hellenistic philosophers that nearly everyone else gets short shrift. I understand the foundational nature of Aristotle but for the love of goddess, can we move into the Common Era, please?

And due to this over-emphasis on the Greeks, absolutely no (I repeat: zero) attention is paid to any non-western philosophers. I hate courses that are utterly convinced that nothing was ever going on east of Greece for all of history. Confucious doesn't get so much as a casual mention. No Arab, Persian, Mughal, or Ottoman writings appear, and not once is Buddhist thought introduced as a concept, let alone a unit worthy of exploration (even though substantial time is devoted to Western religious philosophers mostly from the Catholic tradition). Why must American philosophers persist in this pretense that everything worth teaching happened exclusively in Europe and North America? These are the things I know the least about, need the most instruction on, and which appear almost never in philosophy texts. Jump the Bosporus already. If we're talking "Great Ideas" then let's talk all of them, shall we?

Women are also completely absent from this narrative apart from one quick nod to how poorly they were treated during the Witch Trials that plagued Europe. Apparently Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women was far more obscure and less worthy of mention than 2 hours on William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.

Full disclosure: I did not finish the last four lectures. I was too bored.