Week 1: Grand Unity: Confucius
A moral-spiritual educator and editor of the Chinese classics, Confucius (551–479 BC) taught about the Golden Age, the need for deliberate culture-formation, and the anticipation of a Grand Unity to come, and had a foundational influence on the development of Chinese civilization.
Week 2: Providence: Augustine
The Christian theologian and philosopher Augustine (354–430) offered a providential view of world history, attempting to explain the Classical world’s rise and fall, early Christian civilization’ emergence, and the tension between temporal existence and the City of God (source moral-spiritual guidance and eternal life).
Week 3: Spirit and History: Hegel
German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) developed a historical worldview called “Dialectical Spiritualism,” a synthetic system emphasizing the dynamics of reason-mind-spirit in shaping history, the impact of heroic individuals, the state’s rights and powers, and history’s goal: perfect freedom, the liberating of spirit from confinement in nature.
Week 4: Dialectical Materialism: Marx
Karl Marx (1818–1883), a radical theorist of social and economic history, developed an historical worldview called “Dialectical Materialism,” a matter-based and humanistic account of social progress and human values, most potently expressed in his Communist Manifesto, which foresees changing the world through ongoing socialist revolution.
Week 5: Civilizations and the Axial Age: Karl Jaspers
The German-American existentialist thinker Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) developed a world philosophy that could improve international and intercultural understanding, and proposed an Axial Age (800–200 BC) as the centre of history, when East Asian, South Asian and Western civilizations emerged in their decisive forms.
Week 6: Challenge and Response: Arnold Toynbee
British theorist Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975) described the patterns of generation and decline of thirty civilizations, each in response to internal challenges (new religions and reform movements), and external challenges (rival empires and nomadic invaders), while looking towards a potential universal state of global scope.
