I've got nothing against the the idea of paying for education, obviously, since I'm a former teacher. But the 'great courses' are essentially 'feel-good' audio courses taught by professional teachers who have been recognized as terrifically popular lecturers in undergraduate 'general education' settings. The producers of the audio lectures scour the universities looking for the best rated and most popular and entertaining undergraduate teachers to hire. That's fine. The slant of the audio courses is directed to personal enrichment, which is different from analysis and knowledge proper. I don't read Hegel to make myself feel better about the mysteries of existence but to examine ideas or how those mysteries can be discussed. The relatively high cost for the audio courses -- without the benefit of 'credit' or degrees -- must be matched against the easily available and free books in a good library. Those books, sometimes authored by the very same people who perform on audio disc lectures, are augmented by hundreds of others on the same subject and are, again, free, not $500 or $600 or the books can be purchased for quite modest sums, as everyone knows. My Penguin Classic Hegel cost me about $9 to download to my Kindle. Incidentally, I'm not sure I like to read such books on Kindle because going back and forth through the text, as one really needs to do with philosophy and similar texts is almost too clumsy in the electronic format. Kindle-type readers are fine for novels and light reading. I do think the growing use of electronic readers will make cheaper paperback books a thing of the past. I'll be frustrated if I can't buy paperback editions of tough, meaty books and mark them up with messy marginalia documenting my efforts to understand their content. wc
----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, July 2, 2012 1:42:18 AM Subject: Re: Psychedelic art On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 4:53 AM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote: > Why do good people do bad things? Why > do humans continually fail to end brutality and exploitation when the > alternatives are at hand and are usually more practical? And so on. Could this provide the answer to your questions?: http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=6810
