The Teaching Company Loves Me

 Posted by on 7 October 2004 at 10:00 pm  Uncategorized
Oct 072004
 

Since I’ve been zipping through my courses from The Teaching Company during my commutes to and from school, I just ordered a slew of tapes on Greek, Roman, and Middle Ages history, philosophy, literature, and religion.

Just recently, I finished up Great Ideas of Psychology. I actually enjoyed the course a fair bit, largely because Daniel Robinson took an explicitly philosophical approach to his survey of the subject. Since I’ve never taken any psychology courses, but just read various books on topics of interest, I didn’t fully grasp the utter mess of the discipline until hearing the course. (Robinson seemed to be aware of that defect to some substantial extent, interestingly enough.) To my surprise, Robinson was fairly well-versed in the psychologies of Plato and Aristotle; they were featured in early lectures — and Aristotle was frequently referenced and discussed in later lectures as well. I suspect that neither Robinson’s philosophic approach nor affinity for the Ancient Greeks is widely shared in psychology, but I certainly appreciated it!

At the moment, I am enthralled with History of Science: Antiquity to 1700. (The professor, Lawrence Principe, passed the very important “Great Debt of All Science to Aristotle Test” with flying colors.) The other two parts of the series, History of Science: 1700 to 1900 and Science in the 20th Century are with different professors, so I hope that they measure up.

One of these days, I should put together a place for Objectivist reviews of Teaching Company courses. Most of their courses are excellent, but a few — such as History of Freedom by Rufus Fears — were atrocious. So recommendations from philosophically reliable folks would be a lovely resource. Now if only they had an “affiliates” program like Amazon…

   
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