Note: The free lectures by The Great Courses have been taken offline. But no worries, you can find over 33,000 hours of free lectures from top universities in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. They’ll keep you busy for years to come.
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With Labor Day behind us, it’s officially time to head back to school. That applies not just to kids, but to you. No matter what your age, no matter where you live, no matter what your prior level of education, you can continue deepening your knowledge in areas old and new. And it has never been easier. All you need is a computer or smart phone, an internet connection, some free time, and our free educational media collections. They’re available 24/7 and constantly updated:
Free Online Courses: Right now, you can download free courses (some in video, some in audio) created by some of the world’s leading universities — Stanford, Oxford, Yale, Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT and others. The courses cover pretty much every subject — from philosophy, literature and history, to physics, computer science, engineering and psychology. The collection features about 400 courses in total. And while you can’t take these courses for credit, the amount of personal enrichment offered by these lectures is endless.
Free Textbooks: Another tool for the lifelong learner. This collection brings together roughly 150 free textbooks authored by professors (and some high school teachers) across the globe. The collection will particularly benefit those interested in deepening their knowledge in economics, computer science, mathematics, physics and biology.
Free Language Lessons: Ours is an increasingly globalized world, and it certainly pays to know more than one language. With the free audio lessons listed here, you can learn the basics of Spanish, French and Italian (the languages traditionally taught in American schools). Or you can start boning up on Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages spoken by the new world powers. Taken together, you can Learn 40 Languages for Free.
Free Audio Books: This free collection gives you the ability to download audio versions of important literary works. During your downtime, you can listen to short stories by Isaac Asimov, Raymond Carver, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick. Or you can settle into longer works by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Friedrich Nietzsche and James Joyce.
Free eBooks: Once again, it’s free literary works. But this time you can download e‑texts to your computer or digital reader. Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Gertrude Stein, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust and Kurt Vonnegut. They’re all on the list. And so too are The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume series of enduring works.
Great Science Videos: This list pulls together some of our favorite science videos on the web. It features about 125 videos, covering astronomy & space travel, physics, psychology and neuroscience, religion, technology and beyond.
Intelligent YouTube Sites: Have you ever wanted to separate the wheat from the chaff on YouTube? This list will give you a start. It features over 100 YouTube channels that deliver high quality educational content. Along similar lines, you may want to visit our collection of Intelligent Video Sites. Same concept but applied to sites on the web.
Cultural Icons: If you’ve ever wanted to see great thinkers, artists and writers speaking on video in their own words, this list is for you. It has Borges and Bowie, Coltrane and Coppola, Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky, Tolstoy and Thomas Edison, among others. 275 cultural icons in total.
Free Movies Online: What better way to get a cultural education than to watch some free cinematic masterpieces, including 15 films with Charlie Chaplin, 22 early films by Alfred Hitchcock, 25 Westerns with John Wayne, and a number of Soviet classics by Andrei Tarkovsky. The list of 400+ films goes on. And so does your cultural education.…
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Stephen B. Smith, a political science professor at Yale University since 1984, has made available a 24-lecture course, Introduction to Political Philosophy, which covers Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville.
His approach is highly literary. In his Republic lectures, for instance, he spends a good chunk of the time discussing the metaphors and characters involved. One of Smith’s major concerns is what citizenship amounts to. The lecture above is on Plato’s “Apology,” and while this may be Plato’s most famous work (with its dictum that “The unexamined life is not worth living”), it’s less about political philosophy than about the virtuous life. Smith sees these topics as intimately related, and in his closing lecture, he gives a defense of patriotism, saying that in the ivy league environment, expressing an interest in patriotism is like confessing an interest in child pornography.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the University of Wisconsin-Madison put together one of the finest history programs in the United States, and it was anchored by George Mosse, a German-born cultural historian who authored 25 books covering the English Reformation, Lutheran theology, Jewish history, and fascist ideology. Though he died in 1999, Mosse still remains a legendary figure in Madison, and now the university (where I did my undergraduate work — in history, no less) has dusted off recordings of his courses and made them freely available online.
Three of his courses tie together into a nice package, offering a long look at European Cultural History. The first course takes you from 1500 to 1800, covering the Renaissance, Reformation, English Revolution, Enlightenment, and French Revolution. The second course moves from 1660 to 1880, focusing on the ideas that changed Europe. It’s essentially an intellectual history that traces the rise of Enlightenment thinking, German Romanticism and Idealism (including Hegelianism), the birth of liberalism and Marxism and beyond.
And, finally, the last course focuses on the critical period 1880 — 1920. Here we have a survey of the cultural revolt against bourgeois society, the rise of modern culture (figures like Nietzsche, Freud, & Brecht take center stage), the damage wrought by World War I, and the beginnings of fascism in Europe.
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In 1949, Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish emigré, landed at The University of Chicago, where he spent decades teaching and writing on political philosophy, especially the political thought of the Ancients. Strauss’ thinking skewed conservative, and if he was sometimes controversial while alive, he has become only more so in death (1973). Nowadays he’s considered rightly or wrongly the “intellectual godfather of the neo-conservative political movement,” if not an “intellectual force behind the Bush administration’s plan to invade Iraq.” Although Strauss commented occasionally on contemporary politics (Harper’s has more on that), he spent most of his time working through major philosophical texts, and through his commentaries, developing his own philosophical positions, which were generally hostile to the Enlightenment project and modern individualism/liberalism.
Strauss was unquestionably an influential figure even if he still divides us, and now, courtesy of U. Chicago, you can listen to 15 of his philosophy seminars online. They were recorded between 1959 and 1973, and some representative titles include Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (a course that Paul Wolfowitz took during the early 70s), Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Hegel’s The Philosophy of History.
More seminars will be coming online. For now, we have catalogued all 15 existing seminars in the Philosophy section of our big collection of 1100 Free Online Courses.
Worth a quick mention. Today our constantly-growing list, 350 Free Online Courses from Top Universities, was featured by Netted, a daily newsletter written by the Webbys, the same people who give awards for excellence on the web. I don’t know if we’re achieving excellence on the web. But I do know this: It’s hard to find a collection of resources that’s more valuable than this. The courses come from institutions like Stanford, Yale and MIT. They cover most every topic — from philosophy and history to computer science, physics and math. And they’re all FREE. Find the collection here. Hope you enjoy.
This week, Yale University rolled out its latest batch of open courses. This release, the first since October 2009, features 10 new courses, and brings the total number to 35. Find the complete list here.
We have listed the new additions below, and added them to our ever-growing list of 350 Free Online Courses. As always, Yale gives you access to their courses in multiple formats. You can download lectures (usually in audio and video) from iTunes, or directly from the Yale web site. And then, of course, YouTube is a good third option…
Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts — iTunes Video — iTunes Audio — YouTube — Web Site — Keith E. Wrightson
Walter Kaufmann spent 33 years (1947–1980) teaching philosophy at Princeton. And more than anyone else, Kaufmann introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to the English-speaking world and made it possible to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker – something there wasn’t always room to do in American intellectual circles.
Without simplifying things too much, Kaufmann saw Nietzsche as something of an early existentialist, which brings us to these vintage lectures recorded in 1960 (right around the time that Kaufmann, a German-born convert to Judaism, also became a naturalized American citizen). The three lectures offer a short primer on existentialism and the modern crises philosophers grappled with. Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion begins the series, followed by Nietzsche and the Crisis in Philosophy and Sartre and the Crisis in Morality. You can hear them right below:
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