Phi­los­o­phy does­n’t have to be daunt­ing. Thanks to the Con­tin­u­ing Edu­ca­tion pro­gram at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty, you can ease into philo­soph­i­cal think­ing by lis­ten­ing to five lec­tures col­lec­tive­ly called Phi­los­o­phy for Begin­ners. (Find them above. They’re also on iTune­sU in audio and video, plus on YouTube.). Taught by Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Lec­ture 1 starts with a “Romp Through the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy” and moves in a brief hour from Ancient Greece to the present. Sub­se­quent lec­tures (usu­al­ly run­ning about 90 min­utes) cov­er the fol­low­ing top­ics: log­ic, ethics, pol­i­tics, meta­physics, epis­te­mol­o­gy, and lan­guage. For those han­ker­ing for more phi­los­o­phy, see our col­lec­tion of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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