The old Teaching Company, now known as The Great Courses, is making money. I am glad to know that they will be around for a good long while.
Here's the article: Before YouTube and online classes, there were the Great Courses
They will have a new streaming service too, for cheap. The pleasures and enrichment they offer to the Bird Dog family is huge.
In recent months, we have been doing Greenberg's The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works. That's at home.
In the car, Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. The lecture on Pascal is mind-blowing, a math and physics genius who invented the first binary "computer," who gave his life to Christ. Also, the lecture on Francis Bacon, where the prof reviews Bacon's False Idols of Knowledge and Science (from The New Organum (1620):
- The Idol of the Tribe: the arrogance that comes from agreement with one's colleagues
- The Idol of the Cave: bias coming from one's psychology and background, and the vanity of attachment to an idea
- The Idol of the Marketplace of Words: Wherein words take the place of real knowledge.
- The Idol of Theater: Our received philosophical and scientific views as given by tradition and authority
It's better than college. Buy them on sale, and don't pay the library prices. Or trade with friends and neighbors, as we do.
You will thank me for this free ad for them. We are reviewing the big topics we have forgotten, or didn't have time to take in school. Things we need a guide for. Lifelong learning, like lifelong fitness, is a cliche but for good reason.
