Philosophy for Beginners
- Free
- No certificate
- Beginner
Philosophy for Beginners is a series of five introductory lectures by Marianne Talbot of Oxford's Department for Continuing Education, aimed at students new to philosophy and released as open content; a reading list and a further-reading episode bring the series to seven items. The first lecture is a rapid history of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the present day. The second covers the philosophical method, logic and argument. The remaining three take the main branches of the subject in turn: ethics and politics, metaphysics and epistemology, and philosophy of language and mind.
Along the way the lectures test you on famous thought experiments and introduce central philosophical issues. The series is free, with no enrolment, assessment or certificate. The five lectures are available as audio and video from the series page or via Apple Podcasts and RSS, and every episode page offers a transcript. The recordings are licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK, so they may be shared and adapted for non-commercial purposes with attribution.
What you’ll learn
- Sketch the history of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the present day
- Use logic and argument as the philosopher's basic method
- Identify the central questions of ethics and politics
- Recognise the core problems of metaphysics and epistemology
- Outline the main issues in philosophy of language and mind
Who it’s for
Newcomers who want a map of philosophy's main branches before choosing where to read further.
Source: University of Oxford (opens in a new tab) · Verified · Report a change
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