The Core Concept Playlist Reaches 600!

Earlier this year, we hit a milestone for one of my video series.  The Core Concept playlist reached the 500 video mark back in March, and we celebrated with an online party, hosted on YouTube Live. We've now reached another milestone - though I don't plan to do another party for a while - with the public post of video #600 in the series! 

I first started creating these shorter, more single-issue focused videos as learning resources for students enrolled in my face-to-face classes (at that time at Marist College).  It didn't take long before I realized two things.  First, they could be even more useful for the online classes I was beginning to teach and to develop.  Second - as was the case with my other videos - students, lifelong learners, and even other instructors all across the world were watching the new videos and using them as resources.

My selection of what texts and thinkers to focus upon for the core concept videos has been driven primarily by the needs of my classes.  Each semester I try to add some new content, and - provided I actually have the time - I'll create new videos on that new material.  Sometimes that leads to a lot of videos, enough to cover entire works like Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Rene Descartes' Meditations, or Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

Every once in a while, if I have enough time on my hands, I'll shoot a sequence of core concept videos on a thinker whose work deserves the in-depth video treatment, but which I don't have any immediate plans to teach.  So for example, some time back I shot an entire sequence on Aristotle's short work, the Categories.  Last Fall, I created a few videos on Pascal's Pensees.

At this point in time, here are the thinkers on whom I've got at least one core concept video available:

• Ancient Philosophy:  Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus
  
• Medieval Philosophy: Augustine, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas/
  
• Modern Philosophy: Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant
  
• 19th Century Philosophy: G.W.F. Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  
• Early 20th Century Philosophy: Martin Heidegger, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, W.D. Ross
  
• Later 20th Century Philosophy: Ayn Rand, Ruth Benedict, Alasdair MacIntyre, Lawrence Kohlberg, Virginia Held, James Rachels, and Rosemarie Tong

If you'd like to look around through the Core Concept Videos playlist, click here, and you'll have access to those 600 free videos!