PHI The History Sequence aims to acquaint the student with the basic elements of the history of Western philosophy: its major authors, works, themes, and currents. Seeking an understanding of how philosophical traditions work, it asks how philosophers in the Western tradition have responded to major challenges by rethinking and reconfiguring their heritage. It explores the methodological claim that philosophy can attain a progressively clearer picture of its fundamental problems and their solutions only through a work of memory and retrieval by which it continually resituates its present in relation to its past. The study of origins in “From Ancient to Medieval Philosophy” plays an important role in this project, and is often reserved for the student’s final semester.