This course was originally developed and taught online for students at Marist College. Now it’s an open-enrollment, online course available to learners everywhere. Tuition for the full online class costs only US$75.00!
Here’s where you can enroll in the course and also view sample lessons!
By taking this class, you’ll be introduced to nine key thinkers spanning the history of philosophy, approaching basic questions we are still grappling with today. The philosophers and texts we study in this course are:
- Plato – The Republic (selections)
- Epictetus – Enchiridion and Discourses (selections)
- Boethius – Consolation of Philosophy
- Rene Descartes – Discourse on Method
- Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan (selections)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality
- Mary Wollstonecraft – Vindication of the Rights of Women (selections)
- Karl Marx – Alienated Labor and the Communist Manifesto
- Martin Luther King – I Have a Dream and Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Key philosophical issues that we work our way through include: the nature of the human person; parts of the human personality; the body and the mind or soul; good and bad, right and wrong; how to live a good life; human community and individuals; who should rule and why; education, culture, and society; human development and history; differences of race, class, and gender; whether inequality can be justified or not; free will and determinism; and the nature of the divine.
You can work through the material entirely at your own pace. There is no homework assigned, you won’t be graded, and the quizzes are entirely optional. Best of all, once you enroll, you enjoy lifetime access to the course and all of the resources it includes!
What do you get when you enroll in the course? Students get full access to:
- over 50 lecture videos I designed to help first-time students understand these works
- detailed lesson pages outlining the main ideas of each thinker
- over 25 handouts setting the concepts out in graphic and chart forms
- optional quizzes you can use to test your own understanding of the material
- sets of questions structured to guide you into deeper reflection on the ideas
- PDF copies of the texts we study in the course
- an introductory section helping newcomers to philosophy understand the discipline
This is a great course to take on your own, to work through together with a friend, or to gift to someone you think would enjoy it! To enroll, click here. If you’d like to give this course as a gift, email me directly.
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