Philosophy Project

philCollege was a long time ago, but I was a philosophy major. I chose philosophy because I was intrigued, nothing else particular grabbed me, and I thought it was a good foundation for both literature and law, which I thought I might want to make my career.

It turns out I was right about my career, and I think the study of philosophy WAS good preparation for both these fields. The problem is, I don’t really remember anything I studied. And I don’t think I’ve EVER remembered what I learned in those courses, most of which were in the nature of the history of philosophy. I suppose I learned enough to pass the exams and write the papers, but, please don’t ask me any questions.

I’m not proud of this, and so I’d like to start over again and RE-learn it all. As a lifelong bibliophile, I still have most of my college philosophy texts, plus several more that I’ve picked up along the way. I’m not saying that I’m going to read them all again, but I am going to try to make some sense of it. No time like the present.

Starting with the Ancients . . .

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Comments

  1. The Great Courses has an excellent course, The Great Ideas of Philosophy. I listen to these courses in my car. This one runs 60 lectures, each running around 20-30 minutes. I agree – philosophy is a great foundation to those who write, because we write about ideas, sometimes big ones.

  2. I don’t know how you feel about MOOCs, but I just finished a couple of interesting philosophy courses – “The Modern and Postmodern” was a mostly-historical skimming of major ideas via core writings (including a spot of fiction, like Madame Bovary) from mid-18thC to right now; I’m just in the last throes of “Intro to Philosophy” out of University of Edinburgh, purely topical but was more of a summary of approaches than an examination of actual works (I had some quibbles with the over-reliance on videotaped lectures, but plenty of online resources were provided). For that matter, neither were my favorite MOOCs, and they might be unsuitable for someone with a degree, but you might find something of interest. Thing about MOOCs is that you can devote as much time as you want; I haven’t been able to “skim” a course yet, I either go for it, do the tests and papers and all, or I drop it when time runs short, but a lot of people feel differently.

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