Welcome to my first blog about reviewing a lecture that is free and downloadable from Yale University. I was going to attach the video but it takes up valuable MB's and time for it to download. The videos are pretty big. So just go to the link I posted after Professor Shelly Kagan's name below to get the video yourself.
I have always been interested on furthering my education without going back to school. Some time ago, I googled free online course and discovered quite a few websites where you can study things for free.
One school that I knew I would never financially be able to attend is Yale. After looking through all the available free classes, this introductory class on death and dying by Professor Shelly Kagan caught my eye. http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/
On this website you will find the syllabus, class sessions and videos for each of his class sessions. There are a total of 26 to download. There isn't a lot of reading with this class but the majority of the reading involves Plato’s Phaedo, John Perry’s A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Llych.
I took the time to find a place to be able to download each video for each class to save to my computer to watch at my leisure because, again, the files are pretty big. Shelly, as he likes to be called, is an Indian sitter - on his desk - who is very animated. He uses his hands to talk and is typically a blue jean wearing and tennis shoe wearing man whose voice is not overpowering nor boring.
Basically this class takes the religion out of what I, as a Missionary Baptist, grew up to believe about what happens to the soul/spirit when one dies. He ultimately hopes you will agree with him on at least one theory he believes in about the nature of death. I do think that if you are curious about this topic and can put away your religious views then this will be a good class for you.
He also admits to being a harsh grader. I know I am not getting a grade for this but as to why he feels the need to explain this rumor is more for his students to know why they got an "F" on their first paper. As a theorist, he gets into a discussion about why he doesn't believe he is a hard grader and his main reason, because the administration wouldn't give him the facts on paper. So he goes into another discussion about what the letter grades mean to him. He reads some statements about what past students said about him and his class. One statement that seems to sum him up is a statement from a student who said "You will either like him or you won’t."
Some other Open Course Ware websites include
The University of Notre Dame Which looks like it has a new course from the Spring of 2010 called Paradoxes under its Philosophy Courses. Sounds interesting to me.
You might also want to try Berkeley
The UC Irvine has some OpenCourseWare classes too.
And even Utah State University has online courses.
And you might even want to check out UMass Boston
But I would suggest you start with this website called OEDb or Online Education Database
I know this was the introduction class so he didn’t get into much discussion about death so I couldn’t give you any feedback yet. I will make my next blog about the second class and lecture he gives and give you, my reader, a good discussion of what he discusses but in my words and how I theorize his class.
Permission to freely share or remix the work from this video at Yale can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
And quite a few of the other websites also use this license so people can freely share information and videos.
I have always been interested on furthering my education without going back to school. Some time ago, I googled free online course and discovered quite a few websites where you can study things for free.
One school that I knew I would never financially be able to attend is Yale. After looking through all the available free classes, this introductory class on death and dying by Professor Shelly Kagan caught my eye. http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/
On this website you will find the syllabus, class sessions and videos for each of his class sessions. There are a total of 26 to download. There isn't a lot of reading with this class but the majority of the reading involves Plato’s Phaedo, John Perry’s A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Llych.
I took the time to find a place to be able to download each video for each class to save to my computer to watch at my leisure because, again, the files are pretty big. Shelly, as he likes to be called, is an Indian sitter - on his desk - who is very animated. He uses his hands to talk and is typically a blue jean wearing and tennis shoe wearing man whose voice is not overpowering nor boring.
Basically this class takes the religion out of what I, as a Missionary Baptist, grew up to believe about what happens to the soul/spirit when one dies. He ultimately hopes you will agree with him on at least one theory he believes in about the nature of death. I do think that if you are curious about this topic and can put away your religious views then this will be a good class for you.
He also admits to being a harsh grader. I know I am not getting a grade for this but as to why he feels the need to explain this rumor is more for his students to know why they got an "F" on their first paper. As a theorist, he gets into a discussion about why he doesn't believe he is a hard grader and his main reason, because the administration wouldn't give him the facts on paper. So he goes into another discussion about what the letter grades mean to him. He reads some statements about what past students said about him and his class. One statement that seems to sum him up is a statement from a student who said "You will either like him or you won’t."
Some other Open Course Ware websites include
The University of Notre Dame Which looks like it has a new course from the Spring of 2010 called Paradoxes under its Philosophy Courses. Sounds interesting to me.
You might also want to try Berkeley
The UC Irvine has some OpenCourseWare classes too.
And even Utah State University has online courses.
And you might even want to check out UMass Boston
But I would suggest you start with this website called OEDb or Online Education Database
I know this was the introduction class so he didn’t get into much discussion about death so I couldn’t give you any feedback yet. I will make my next blog about the second class and lecture he gives and give you, my reader, a good discussion of what he discusses but in my words and how I theorize his class.
Permission to freely share or remix the work from this video at Yale can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
And quite a few of the other websites also use this license so people can freely share information and videos.
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