The Philosophy section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 100 courses. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.
- Philosophy for Beginners – iTunes – Web Video – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
- Critical Reasoning for Beginners – iTunes Video – iTunes Audio – Web Video – Oxford
- A Romp through Ethics for Complete Beginners – iTunes Video–Web Video – Oxford
- Introduction to Political Philosophy – YouTube – iTunes – Web Video – Steven B. Smith, Yale
- The Art of Living – Web Video – Stanford
- The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps – Multiple Formats– Peter Adamson, King’s College London
Then, once you’ve found your footing, you can head off in some amazing directions. As we mentioned many moons ago, you can access courses and lectures by modern day legends – Michel Foucault, Bertrand Russell, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Sandel. Then you can sit back and let them introduce you to the thinking of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre and the rest of the gang. The courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web.
Explore our collection of 950 Free Courses to find topics in many other disciplines — History, Literature, Physics, Computer Science and beyond. As we like to say, it’s the most valuable single page on the web.
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Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)
As much as I am grateful to the people responsible for putting these courses online (and of course those resposible for making them in the first place) I wish many of them would realise that for various reasons some people don’t have access to itunes.
Why not? Even if you don’t own a single Apple product, you can still use iTunes in order to have access to iTunes U. Or am I missing something and this is not the problem?
I can’t speak for Eric A Blair, but since my machine only runs linux, iTunes won’t run here. No iTunes version has run on linux for several years now.
There may be a way to convert an iTunes feed to an ordinary RSS feed, say by Feed Flipper, but I haven’t tested Feed Flipper.
There are also a number of intelligent videos online from websites like Oxford U. That, and much of Public Domain philosophy is relatively accesible to the intellectually interested person.
I don’t like videos*, I have damaged hearing (no, not from honking big rock-speakers) and I’d rather read. I’m hoping those sources cited by Karl may have my preferred format.
*(I read lips–watching a tiny low quality video screen drives me nuts!)
Some of the courses have PowerPoint slide sets – Marianne Talbot’s and Peter Millican’s do…
Help me with philosophy books
I like the books
Thank so much in advance.